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KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 
IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
NEW YORK - BOSTON : CHICAGO - DALLAS 
ATLANTA + SAN FRANCISCO 


MACMILLAN & CO., LimitTep 
LONDON » BOMBAY + CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 


THE MACMILLAN CO. OF C4™NADA, Lt. 
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KNOWLEDGE OF Gop 
IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT: 


AS 


BY 
MARY REDINGTON ELY 


jew Pork 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1925 
All rights reserved 


CopyRIGHT, 1925, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 





Set up and printed. 
Published April, 1925. 


Printed in the United States of America by 
J. Je LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK 


PREFACE 


This book directs itself to the study of one phase 
only of the religious thought of the Fourth Gospel. 
It does not aim at a comprehensive treatment of 
Johannine theology, but dealing, as it does, with one 
of the most fundamental propositions upon which 
Johannine theology is built, it is offered in the hope that 
it may make its contribution to the understanding of 
the gospel as a whole. 

The new study of the New Testament rests upon 
the assumption that we cannot fully understand the 
documents of the early Christian movement until we 
have oriented ourselves in the world from which they 
sprang, and this study has been engaged in with this 
aim in view. Its task is the reconstruction of the world 
of thought surrounding the author of the Fourth Gos- 
pel as it bore upon the concept which he held to be 
central for Christianity. Its office will have been ful- 
filled if it can help toward a true appreciation of what 
the author of the gospel meant in that significant 
definition of Christian experience—‘This is life eternal, 
that they should know Thee, the only true God, and 
him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.” 

My debt is great to many, but I wish to express 
special thanks for valuable suggestion and help in the 
preparation of this volume to Professor Shirley Jackson 
Case of the University of Chicago, to Professors James 
Everett Frame and Eugene William Lyman of the 

vii 


Vili _ PREFACE 


Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and 
to my colleague, Miss Cornelia C. Coulter of Vassar 
College. 

Mary REpINGTON ELy. 
Vassar College 
April 20, 1925 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGH 
LUN TROD UCTIONM ANT t (fhi) y amr Gola 9 
Pe etsy IOHANNINEG USE a ore uae 2S 


III. Irs Usz— 1n ConTEMporRARY RELIGIONS . 44 


Poplin ci istoricw | UGaismiis ie 2) ies ACA d 
Ze liek Aestinisn wi NCAISE) sao yu) eae Pe SO 
3. In Hellenistic Judaism . . . . 64 
Aenlnsthievivivsteriesy vain fc de tite yer eZ 
Bari Canosticisihnme sin ah elt Veblen. | sea OF 
6. In Hermetic Speculation and the 
Magical? Papyrraiicn tits ao) a LOO 
7. In the Odes of Solomon. . . . 108 
Bonin, PaulmerChiristianity i) u.en er eet bad. 


IV. Its MEANING IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 130 


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KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 
IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


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KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN 
JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


I 
INTRODUCTION 


HE increasing understanding of the evolutionary 
nature of Christianity has carried with it a 
truer appreciation of the purpose and character 

of its early writings. ‘The documents are now seen 
to be susceptible of interpretation only in the light of 
the conditions of life which lay behind them. ‘The 
older view, which held the documents as ends in them- 
selves and used theological interpretation as the method 
of research, has given place to a consideration of the 
New ‘Testament writings as means through which to 
view the community life of which they were an ex- 
pression, ‘This is but another way of saying that the 
temper of New Testament study today is prevailingly 
historical rather than theological, and that the shift 
from a dogmatic to a sociological and ethical interest 
in the field of religion has compelled the adoption 
of the historian’s method in the study of a religious 
movement. 

But this shift of interest which makes us look at 
documents as means rather than as ends, has had, in 
its turn, an effect upon our knowledge of the writings 
themselves. If Christianity is to be viewed as genu- 


a 


10 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


inely evolutionary in character, reflecting the life of 
men, actually a part of the social order in the succes- 
sive stages of the world’s history, then our understand- 
ing of its expression in institutions, in practices, and in 
documents is increased by any advance we may make 
in knowledge of social, political, ethical, geographical, 
or economic conditions in the times which produced 
them. 

The documents have become means through which 
to gain acquaintance with the thought of the day, but, 
at the same time, the writings themselves have become 
much more understandable, as the light of surrounding 
conditions has been thrown upon them. 

In the case of no one of the New Testament writ- 
ings has this relationship between the understanding of 
the social order and thought of the time in which it ap- 
peared, and the understanding of the book itself been 
more apparent than in the case of the Fourth Gospel. 
‘The Gospel seen as “literature waiting upon life” re- 
veals a critical period in the development of the Chris- 
tian community in the early decades of the second 
century. 

Here was a process of transition, of critical re- 
adjustment in the Christian community. It was transi- 
tion from the primitive era of spontaneous enthusiasm 
to a more settled and permanent régime, with the 
immediate expectation of Messianic glories removed. 
It was transition from the homogeneous culture of an 
isolated Palestine to the varied and complex civiliza- 
tion of the Greco-Roman world. It was transition 
from a world of thought which dealt with external, 
mechanical, and very practical ideas to a culture that 
was genuinely philosophical, and that gave tolerant 
interest to widely diverse speculative systems.* 

*Scott: The Fourth Gospel, pp. 4-9. 


INTRODUCTION II 


This fact of the transitional nature of the book’s 
environment once grasped, the motive for writing 
which such an environment would produce once ap- 
preciated, many of the older difficulties in the inter- 
pretation of the book itself become explicable. We 
can see a reason for the blending of varying and even 
contradictory modes of thought, for the introduction 
of Gentile ideas, for the various defensive positions of 
the book, and, in the main, for the general trend of 
thought which sets forth the meaning of the life of 
Jesus as eternal and spiritual, and claims that 
inward fellowship with him is the essence of religious 
experience. 

Without the book, we should have lost one of our 
best sources for knowledge of the transitional character 
of the period through which Christianity was passing; 
but without this fundamental fact which. reveals the 
raison d’étre of the book itself, we should be at a loss 
to interpret many of the minor features of the writing. 

It is to one phase of the study of the environment 
and motivation of the Fourth Gospel to which this 
study addresses itself. Its purpose is the discovery of 
the causes at work which produced in the mind of the 
writer an emphasis upon knowledge of God as essen- 
tial to religion; what notions about the place of knowl- 
edge in religious experience he met with in his environ- 
ment; how far they acted as stimuli to which his view 
may be seen as a response—and accordingly what 
meaning he gave to the term. 

A view of this problem of “knowledge” in. the 
Fourth Gospel which commands high respect and in- 
terest has been presented in Professor E. F. Scott’s 
article ‘Hellenistic Mysticism in the Fourth Gospel.” 2 
In the course of his study of the genetic relationships 

* Amer. Jour. Theol. XX, pp. 191 ff. 


I2 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


of the mysticism of the Fourth Gospel, which convinc- 
ingly demonstrates a kinship between the Fourth Gos- 
pel and the redemption systems of the Hellenistic 
world, Dr. Scott says: ‘‘ ‘Knowledge’ for the evange- 
list is the response on man’s part to the revelation 
offered by God. It has nothing to do with any activity 
of the reason, but proceeds from that higher illumina- 
tion by which we become aware of unseen realities. 
‘Faith’ is now merged in ‘knowledge,’ not because the 
emphasis has shifted from the moral to the intellectual 
side, but because the message of Christ is conceived 
as mystery, only to be appropriated by an inspired 
yv@oig.” * Fully sympathetic with the general 
trend of Dr. Scott’s article, and deeply appreciative 
of its learning and acumen, the present writer is dis- 
posed to press certain questions in relation to this 
phase of its thought. Is the “knowledge” for which 
the Fourth Gospel stands a “mystery” in the Hel- 
lenistic sense? Is the road to its achievement exclu- 
sively the way of illumination as in the mystery cults? 
Has the concept divested itself of its reasoning and 
reflective elements? Is the Johannine conception of 
Christianity, as Dr. Scott asserts, more truly ‘‘a re- 
ligion of redemption in the Hellenistic sense’ than in 
Paul’s thought? # 

Dr. Scott has indicated other features of the Johan- 
nine exposition of religion which differentiate it from 
the mystery-cult: its dismissal of crude or primitive 
notions of astrology, magic, angelology, and demon- 
ology; its substitution of the constant mood of com- 
munion with God for the ecstatic rapture of the mys- 
tery-religions; its more spiritual interpretation of the 
sacramental rites; its universalistic note, as against the 
esoteric notions of redemption in the mystery-cults; its 


5 Amer. Jour. Theol. XX, p. 345. * OD. cit., p. 347. 


INTRODUCTION 13 


ethical emphasis, and, most significantly, its grounding 
upon historical fact. 

The conclusion of the article is that the Fourth 
Gospel, representing as it does the fusion of many 
strains of thought, is still much more than a mere 
mingling of Oriental, Greek, and Jewish elements; 
that its mysticism is of a new and unique type whose 
source we have yet to discover. “All that he borrows 
from contemporary religion is pressed into the service 
of a new mysticism which rests on a deeper apprehen- 
sion of the meaning of the life of Christ.” > 

The soundness of this conclusion is indisputable. 
The book stands quite alone not only in Christian his- 
tory, but in the history of all religious literature; it 
is the work of an original and creative mind, and that 
recognition must not be lost sight of in any genetic 
study of its views. But the keener our penetration into 
the knowledge of both its affiliations with, and its 
divergences from the trends of thought from which it 
sprang, the finer our appreciation of its creative genius, 
and the surer our understanding of the message which 
it aims to give. 

The question, then, which we would consider is that 
of the meaning of the term “knowledge of God” in 
the mysticism of the Fourth Gospel. Is it, as Dr. 
Scott has affirmed, equivalent to the “mystery” of the 
Hellenistic religion of redemption? Or is it possible 
that in the use of the concept also, as well as in the 
directions listed by Dr. Scott, there has been departure 
from its generally accepted use in the Hellenistic 
redemption-religions ? 

To see our way into the study, it may be well to 
take account, as briefly and swiftly as possible, of the 
function of knowledge in religion in somewhat general 


5 Op. cit., p. 359. 


I4 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


terms, and—since our Gospel classifies unquestionably 
in the field of mystical expression—of knowledge as 
a part of faystical religion. Primitive religion does 
not concern itself with reflective or rational processes. 
Helplessness in the face of external forces over which 
he has no control, bewilderment in the presence of 
dreams, death, and other phenomena of human life 
which are beyond his power to regulate, lead primi- 
tive man to seek ways to propitiate or to coerce the 
mysterious supernatural powers which instinctively he 
feels must lie behind these events. Shamanism could 
make use of ecstatic phenomena with ease, for the very 
reason that reflective thinking played so negligible a 
part in primitive religion. 

Modern sociological investigation in the field of re- 
ligion has let us see how late a development reflective 
thinking is in the history of religion. Rites, we are 
told, precede reflection upon the meaning of rites, and 
any rational processes, such as creed-building or spec- 
ulation upon the intellectual values of religion, are of 
late development. 

Religion does in time, however, present itself as 
something to be known as well as felt. In a priestly 
system, like the Vedic, the priest-class is composed of 
those who snow—know what are the proper sacri- 
fices for given situations, know how the gods are to be 
pleased. ‘The tradition of that possession of knowledge 
must be maintained by the priest-class, since it is the 
source of their livelihood; and sacerdotalism progresses 
fostered by itself in the interests of self-protection for 
the governing class. 

In distinction from cultic systems of religion, ethical 
or legal systems find use for knowledge in the necessity 
for correct observance of an ethical code. Interpreters 
of the ethic, like the scribe of the Hebrew faith, take 


INTRODUCTION 15 


the place of the priest-class in the priestly system. 
Confucianism, at the extreme of the ethical type, asks 
that its followers know and apply the system of ethics 
for which it stands. 

Knowledge, in the external sense, also has a place 
in the creed-making tendencies of religions of all types 
as they develop along with the civilizations of which 
they are a part. Here, the theologian becomes the 
expert who brings the doctrine to its complete and 
well-rounded expression. “The far reaches of intel- 
lectual development in religion reveal themselves in 
the philosophy and psychology of religion where its 
ultimate realities are weighed, or its processes sub- 
jected to the scrutiny of scientific examination. 

Knowledge, however, as an integral factor in per- 
sonal religious experience itself—not imparted by a 
sacerdotal class who have cultic practices in their 
charge; not mediated through official interpreters who 
are the guardians of the group ethics; nor yet formu- 
lated by the theologians who are the systematizers of 
doctrine; nor subjected to scientific analysis by experts 
in the philosophical or psychological field, but knowl- 
edge which is in and of itself a part of personal re- 
ligious experience finds its way into man’s life through 
the channels of mystical religion. 

Even in philosophical systems which border closely 
on religion, the rational element often passes over into 
mysticism, as for example, with Plato, in whose system 
the contemplation of reality brought a kind of ecstasy 
which differed from religious ecstasy more in the steps 
by which man arrived at it, than it did in kind or in 
effect. 

Mysticism is a term so loosely used as almost to 
defy definition, but for the purposes of this study, we 
may take it in its stricter sense as a “type of religion 


16 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


which puts emphasis on immediate experience of God, 
a direct and intimate consciousness of divine reality.’ © 
_ Here is the emergence of the individual from the group, 
as an entity, capable of individual experience in the 
field of religion apart from the social needs. 

In the extreme forms of mystical experience, com- 
plete absorption, or loss of personality takes place, and, 
along with all muscular control, mental functions cease, 
and the knowledge derived from the experience is 
known as “immediate” or intuitive knowledge. But 
as Coe has demonstrated by his chart of the genealogy 
of mysticism, there is genuine psychological continuity 
from the most primitive automatisms of Shamanism to 
mystical experiences which involve complete loss of 
personality, as in the extreme forms of rapture known 
as ecstasy.” 

Between the two extremes, lie the more usual 
ranges of mystical experience with partial abeyance of 
mental functions, and with a revelation which seems 
to the participant to be self-evident. 

In ordinary usage, we employ the terms “emotional 
mysticism” or “intellectual mysticism” to denote re- 
spectively those forms of mystical experience in which 
emotion has the predominance over the intellectual, or 
those forms in which the proportion is reversed. And 
in general, the test must lie in the field of process 
rather than of content, since the revelation seems, in 
any case, to the participant to be new knowledge, quite 
independent of any rational processes of his own. 

The question really lies here: are the steps taken to 
induce the mystical state, those which lie in the field of 
reflection or those which have subordinated rational 


* As defined by Rufus Jones in his article “Mysticism,” in 
A Dictionary of Religion and Ethics, p. 302. 
"Coe, The Psychology of Religion, pp. 263 ff. 


INTRODUCTION 17 


processes and made direct appeal to the emotions? For 
the problem which lies directly before us, we are inquir- 
ing whether the author of the Fourth Gospel desired 
to teach a genuinely mystical form of religion as did 
the exponents of the Hellenistic mysteries. How far did 
the Johannine writer desire a suppression of rational 
faculties in man’s experience of God? How far did 
he make direct appeal for them? Did “knowledge” 
stand for ecstatic illumination to him, or did he believe 
that it was the result of man’s reflection? 

It is not to be supposed that any such analysis in 
psychological terms is thought to have existed at the 
time of the writing of the Gospel. The facts and the 
processes existed but they were not classified or named. 
The greatest caution must be exercised against at- 
tributing modern psychological analysis to an age as 
innocent of such processes as it was of modern methods 
of aerial navigation. Nothing could be farther from 
the thought of the writer than the expectation of any 
self-conscious analysis of religious experience into 
emotional or intellectual elements, any appeal by the 
author of the Fourth Gospel to his readers that pre- 
supposed a sophisticated value-judgment upon this 
or that kind of mystical experience. It would be folly 
in the extreme to look for any such result from this 
study. 

What does, however, seem to the writer possible, 
and for purposes of a genuine understanding of the 
Gospel, profitable, is to examine the total concept 
of man’s experience of God as the Fourth Gospel 
portrays it, and with the help of such analysis as 
we have at our command today to bring before us 
as clear a notion as we can of what the writer actually 
meant when he defined the life eternal, which to him 
was the essence of religion, as “that they should 


18 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom 
thou didst send.” 

As is quite self-evident, there is no direct method 
open for such a study. The author of the Gospel did 
not subject his own religious faith to analysis, even of 
a simple sort. He has made no comparisons between 
his own belief and those contemporary religious systems 
which he knew. He has rather projected into a literary 
form, which is more poetic and dramatic than it is 
analytical or catalogic, a deep, personal religious ex- 
perience, which he believed would be of value to 
mankind. 

At the center of that experience there lay a concept 
which he called “knowledge of God.” Such a concept 
is capable of more than one interpretation. It may 
have meant to him a highly emotionalized experience 
in which “knowledge” was equivalent to feeling, di- 
vorced from rational processes. It may have signified 
to him an experience in which reflective or rational 
processes figured with sufficient strength to make him 
recognize them as essential. 

Two gateways lie open before us for the study 
which may help to bring us understanding of the con- 
cept. One avenue will be through the treatment of 
the concept in the Gospel itself, the proportional em- 
phasis which the writer places upon it, the context of 
ideas into which it is set, and the language which he 
uses in referring to it. Both the process and the con- 
tent of the knowledge which he holds to be of primary 
significance for religion, may thus be viewed, even 
though the author has offered no formal description 
or analysis of it. 

The second avenue to an understanding of the con- 
cept is through the treatment of it in other religious 
systems with which the writer came into contact. And 


INTRODUCTION 19 


here we may hope for light upon the motives which 
impelled the author to express himself as he did. His 
work came into being as a response to an environment 
in which religious values took a high place. This very 
concept “knowledge” was one of primary significance 
in the religious experience of the day. 

Indeed, the word gnosis, we may well believe, held 
in the popular vocabulary of religion in that day much 
the same place that such terms as “social,” ‘“‘demo- 
cratic,’ and “evolution” hold in our religious vocabu- 
lary today. He was dealing with a concept that was 
characteristic of his day, and his use of it meant a 
response either favorable or unfavorable to the pre- 
vailing notions which he met in his world. A com- 
parison between his use of it and that of contemporary 
religious thought should help us to see the motive 
behind his employment of it. 

It might at first sight appear sufficient to compare 
the Fourth Gospel view of “knowledge” with that of 
the mystery-religions, since that is the comparison which 
Dr. Scott’s article most directly suggests, but it must 
be remembered that neither the Fourth Gospel nor the 
mystery religions stand apart from the great syncre- 
tistic process which was characteristic of their age. To 
see any one of the concepts which formed a part of a 
given author’s structure of ideas in that day with any 
real appreciation of its place in his world, compels an 
inductive study of the concept as it appeared in the 
various religious systems which he touched either 
directly or indirectly. 

A mere glimpse into the complex religious situa- 
tion of the city of Ephesus ® at the close of the first 
century of the Christian era is all that is needed to 


* Proceeding upon the usually accepted view of the prove- 
nance of the Gospel. 


20 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


give a realization that incentives to religious expres- 
sion would spring from such a milieu. Interchange 
of ideas had meant, on the one hand, adaptation of 
one system by another, where yielding was possible, 
and on the other hand, defense of some positions too 
dear to relinquish when conflict appeared. 

For Christianity particularly this syncretizing proc- 
ess had brought rapid development. With the shift 
from Palestine to Asia Minor, had come to the Chris- 
tian movement not merely the liberality of spirit that 
would allow the participation of Gentiles in the Chris- 
tian brotherhood, but the compulsion to an actual re- 
phrasing of the categories of Christian thought, to 
make them comprehensible to the Graeco-Roman world. 
No religion could commend itself on new ground if 
it spoke in a language unintelligible to the culture of 
that soil. 

Part of the adapting process had already been done 
by Paul, but it was not complete. In Ephesus, in par- 
ticular, Christianity found itself at a pivotal point in 
the whirlpool of religious and philosophical thought 
of the first century a.D. The ancient seat of Greek 
Artemis-worship, Ephesus had, through her commer- 
cial importance, also come to be the meeting-place of 
Oriental and Western systems of thought. The old 
philosophical school of Heraclitus was now exerting 
only a traditional influence, but a new philosophy was 
alive in democratic dress. Stoics, Cynics, and Epicu- 
reans were the popular preachers of a philosophy that 
came closer to religion than any ancient philosophy 
had done.® Judaism had her synagogues in Ephesus,*® 
and the city was rife with the revival of the redemp- 


° Gardner, The Ephesian Gospel, Ch. i. 
* Acts xix. 8. 


INTRODUCTION 21 


tion-religions—the popular faiths offering individual 
salvation to a world intensely eager for just such 
religious satisfactions. 

The urge to a new presentation of Christianity in 
such a situation can well be understood. The era of 
high enthusiasm had passed; the expectation of the 
immediate return of Jesus, long-deferred, had resolved 
itself into an acceptance of the work of a risen and 
exalted Christ. The teaching and ministry of Paul 
had made the partial adjustment to Hellenistic ways 
of expression, and had given the stamp of a redemp- 
tion religion to Christianity; but now, after a half- 
century, the closer touch of the Christian movement 
with the syncretistic tendencies in religious thought in 
Asia Minor had compelled a new presentation. 

There could be no understanding of the Fourth 
Gospel without recognition of the fact that in some 
directions the author found himself accepting as his 
own, ideas that were current in other forms of 
religious thought, and that in others he found him- 
self at variance with them, and took a stand against 
them. A special emphasis here, a greater impressive- 
ness of utterance there, will become explicable when 
seen in relation to this situation. 

The give and take of such a world of thought is 
a determining factor for the religious expression of 
any exponent of a faith whom it touches, and the 
approach to understanding of any such concept as 
we have taken for study must be by way of the con- 
temporary thought. Does it indicate a favorable or 
an unfavorable reaction to its environment? 

It will readily be observed that this second method 
of approach is by no means a search for evidence of 
literary dependence between the Fourth Gospel and 


22 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


documents representing contemporary cults.“ It is 
rather the attempt to look through the documents to 
the thought of which they are the expression, to see 
if there is revealed community of thought with the 
Fourth Gospel, or if that seems not to be the case, 
to see whether there is revealed a motive for the 
Fourth Gospel expression as corrective or restraining 
of the contemporary view. It is a search for attitudes, 
not for phrases, and its purpose is to discover such 
clues as we can to the meaning and purposes of the 
expression in the Gospel. i 

Again, we must remind ourselves that no analysis 
of either the process or the content of religious expe- 
rience will appear in such terms as we are accus- 
tomed to use today. We must be content to observe 
and make our own analysis. But some indications 
should result of how man thought about “knowledge” 
as a factor in religious experience in that day, and 
how the Fourth Gospel took its stand in relation to 
that thought. 

The study will, then, proceed along the following 
lines: (1) A study of the use of the concept ‘“‘knowl- 
edge” as fundamental to religious experience in the 
Fourth Gospel itself; (2) an investigation of other 


“That similarities in diction are not sufficient always to 
prove the dependence of one system upon another is demon- 
strated by the formula: 

év att® CHpev xai xwovueda xal gouév, Acts 17:28. 

navta dv’ adtot éyéveto, John 1:3. 

é— avtod xai dv adtod xal cic adtév ta TavTA, Rom. 11:36. 
sometimes offered as evidence of the dependence of Chris- 
tianity on Hermetism (Poim. 15:19). Norden (Agnostos 
Theos, p. 23) has shown that this formula was the common 
possession of the mystery-religions with the Stoics, going 
back to the time of Heraclitus. (Cf. Kroll: Die Lehren des 
Hermes Trismegistos, p. 49.) 


INTRODUCTION 23 


systems of religion available to this writer to see how 
the concept figured there; (3) a return to the Fourth 
Gospel to view the concept in relation to the other 
systems examined and to see what light is thrown 
upon the Gospel by the sphere of thought thus 
revealed. 

A word should be said about the relation of the 
study to the philosophies which were current in the 
Mediterranean world at the time of the writing of 
the Gospel. Since our study is specifically one of 
religious experience, no special section has _ been 
devoted to the study of the philosophies which the 
Fourth Gospel touched; but in the individual empha- 
sis for which philosophy stood in that day, we should 
find a closely related area of thinking to the empha- 
sis of mystical religion. As has already been pointed 
out, the affinities between such a philosophical ecstasy 
as Plato advocated and the ends of mystical religion 
are close. 

The philosophies which were current in the Med- 
iterranean world in the first century A.D. were at 
work upon many of the same problems as those which 
were engaging the religious systems of the day. Stoi- 
cism was for many, more a religion than a philosophy. 
The diatribe form, characteristic of both the Cynic 
and the Stoic schools, was a preaching form with a 
popular practical morality rather than a speculative 
process as its end. 

Already the beginnings of epistemological theory 
were emerging and were giving their contribution to 
theories of knowledge in religion as well.12 No study 


“How close the correlation is between philosophy and 
religion at this time may be observed in Bousset’s review of 
Norden’s Agnostos Theos (Theologie Literaturzeitung, 
1913, Vol. 38, pp. 195-6) in his discussion of the use of 


24. KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


of Christianity in the first and second centuries is 
complete without a recognition of the debt it owes 
to current philosophical systems. For the Fourth Gos- 
pel that indebtedness is especially deep. 

Through whatever gateway the Fourth Gospel 
received directly its Logos-concept, it owes it ulti- 
mately to Greek philosophy, Heraclitus, Plato and the 
Stoics. Whatever adaptation it may have undergone 
at the hands of Philo or of Hermetic speculation, its 
roots were in Greek speculation. The dualistic theory 
appearing in the Fourth Gospel as “‘the children of 
light” and “the children of darkness” was its heritage 
from Hellenistic religion but it, in turn, derived it 
from Hellenic philosophy. 

And so we might go on, indicating the debts which 
the Fourth Gospel owes to philosophy, but since our 
study is one of “knowledge” as a religious concept, 
no detailed examination of its place in philosophical 
systems will be entered upon. But it will be assumed 
as axiomatic that the syncretistic tendency of the Hel- 
lenistic age was not confined to the sphere of reli- 
gion, but that it brought religion and philosophy into 
close correlation with each other and that all the 
religious systems under discussion were, to a more 
or less degree, products of that great fusing process.2? 

For purposes of this investigation, it will not be 
necessary to traverse the ground of critical investigation 
upon the authorship and date of the Gospel. Bacon’s 
yiv@oxerv tov Oedv by Posidonius and ‘its mystical signifi- 
cance. And the very existence of such a system as Gnosti- 
cism is testimony to the overlapping of the two fields. 

“For a discussion of the relationship between philosophy 
and religion in the Hellenistic age, see Case, The Evolution 
of Early Christianity, Ch. viii; and for the indebtedness of 
the Fourth Gospel to Stoicism, see Scott, The Fourth Gos- 
pel, pp. 147 ff. 


INTRODUCTION 25 


“The Fourth Gospel in Research and Debate” %4 
brings fairly and fully before us the debate upon 
the question, and is adequate testimony to the fact 
that any satisfactory discussion of the evidence is a 
considerable volume in itself.t° Conclusions differ 
because most scholars are ready to grant that the 
evidence is not decisive. The differences are those of 
opinion starting from the same body of facts. The 
patristic evidence can carry us no further with finality 
than to substantiate the fact that the Gospel was in 
existence early in the second century, and upon this 
point there is no debate. The decision as to the date 
and authorship of the Gospel must rest ultimately 
upon internal evidence, and from that evidence such 
scholars as Sanday,*® Stanton,?? Strachan,1® Ezra 
Abbott,?® Westcott,2° and Drummond ? have deduced 
the traditional view of apostolic authorship. That 
position is stated by Drummond as follows: 


“We have now gone carefully through the arguments 
against the reputed authorship of the Gospel, and on 


“Bacon, The Fourth Gospel in Research and Debate, 
New York, 1910. 

* A recent and most admirable treatment of the author- 
ship and dating of the Fourth Gospel is H. Latimer Jack- 
son’s, The Problem of the Fourth Gospel, Cambridge, 1918. 

Sanday, The Authorship and Historical Character of 
the Fourth Gospel, Macmillan, 1872. 

“Stanton, The Gospels as Historical Documents, Cam- 
bridge, 1909. 

“Strachan, Art. “Gospel of John,” in the Dictionary of 
Christ and the Gospels. 

Ezra Abbott, The Authorship of the Fourth Gospel, 
Boston, 1880. 

* Westcott, The Gospel according to St. John, London, 
1908. 

“Drummond, The Character and Authorship of the 
Fourth Gospel, Scribners, 1904. 


26 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


the whole we have found them wanting. Several appear 
to be quite destitute of weight; others present some dif- 
ficulty; one or two occasion real perplexity. But diffi- 
culties are not proofs, and we have always to consider 
whether greater difficulty is not involved in rejecting a 
proposition than in accepting it. This seems to me to 
be the case in the present instance. . . . On weighing 
the arguments for and against to the best of my power, 
I must give my own judgment in favor of the Johan- 
nine authorship.” ” 


Prof. E. F. Scott, on the other hand, is repre- 
sentative of a group who, working from the same 
evidence, arrive at the conclusion that the author of 
the Gospel was not the John who was the son of 
Zebedee and the disciple of Jesus. The position taken 
by this group is fairly stated by Dr. Scott in his 
“The Historical and Religious Value of the Fourth 
Gospel”: 


“The Fourth Gospel, therefore, cannot be attributed 
to the Apostle John, and the real secret of its author- 
ship seems to be irrevocably lost. Many attempts have 
been made in recent times to connect it with some par- 
ticular name; but with our scanty knowledge of the early 
history of the Church, they are hazardous at the best. 
The evangelist himself remains unknown. All that we 
can do is to distinguish, within certain limits, the time 
and place in which he composed his work. From various 
indications, both internal and external, we can infer that 
he belonged to Asia Minor and probably to the region 
of Ephesus. His date has been much disputed; but the 
evidence would seem to point, more and more decisively, 
to some time within the first two decades of the second 
century.” ” 


“Drummond, of. cit., p. 514. 


"Scott, The Historical and Religious Value of the Fourth 
Gospel, p. 12. 


INTRODUCTION 27 


Without argument, this discussion will accept the 
critical position thus stated, and will proceed upon 
its assumptions, no closer definition of authorship or 
date being necessary for the purposes of the study 
undertaken.”* 


“Tt should be noted as evidence of the convergence of 
opinion upon non-apostolic authorship of the Gospel, that 
both Sanday and Strachan have indicated a cuange of view 
subsequent to the writing of the works cited. 

Strachan, The Fourth Gospel, Its Significance and En- 
vironment, p. 9. 

Sanday, Divine Overruling, T. and T. Clark, Edinburgh, 
1920, p. 61. 

Mention should also be made of the recent investigations 
of Canon C. F. Burney of Rochester, England, and Pro- 
fessor Charles C. Torrey of Yale University, both of whom 
see in the Gospel evidence of Aramaic origin. (Burney: 
The Aramaic Origin of the Fourth Gospel, Oxford Univer- 
sity Press; Torrey: “The Aramaic Origin of the Gospel of 
John,” Harvard Theological Review, Vol. xvi, p. 305. 


II 
ITS JOHANNINE USE? 


' N JE have given ourselves the task of discover- 
ing the part that “knowledge of God” plays 
in the Fourth Gospel. The genuinely mys- 

tical character of the religion which the Gospel 

teaches is unmistakable. The book has been, indeed, 
the fountain-head of mystical Christianity, and in all 
the centuries of Christian literary expression it has 
stood unsurpassed in that field. Our question is cen- 
tered about the mysticism of the Gospel, to see whether 
it is primarily an intellectual or an emotional mysti- 
cism. We want to see what the author meant by 

“knowledge”; whether it figured in his mysticism as 

a genuinely intellectual concept, or was loosely used 

to denote the goal of a mystical experience which was 

actually emotional in character. 

Partly we hope to throw light upon the problem 
by seeing how the concept figured in the religious life 
which surrounded the Gospel in other systems than 
the Christian one, but our first task is the study of 
the Fourth Gospel itself, to see how “knowledge of 
God” figured in its own thought. 

Preliminary to our examination of that concept in 
the Gospel, it may be well to pass in review quite 

* Acknowledgment should be made of the writer’s indebt- 
edness in this study to the unpublished lectures of Professor 


James Everett Frame, given in his course on The Gospel 
of John, in Union Theological Seminary, New York City. 


28 


ITS JOHANNINE USE 29 


rapidly the leading religious positions which the Gos- 
pel affirms. Standing as a fourth biography of Jesus 
in the collection of New Testament writings, it dif- 
ferentiates itself from the other three by its interpre- 
tive aim. The historical life of Jesus is treated for 
the sake of making clear its eternal, spiritual mean- 
ing in the life of the world. 
_ Jesus appears as the eternal Logos, the incarnation 
of God, the revealer of Life and Light to men. By 
him, man has access to that eternal life, which is not 
merely protracted existence in future time, but a qual- 
ity of living here and now. Salvation, in the mind 
of the writer, is not a future, external transaction, 
contingent upon resurrection in the age to come, but 
an immediate, present reality, spiritual in its nature, 
a sharing of the divine life, meditated by the Son. 
Thus the essence of religion is an individual expe- 
rience, mystical union with God, a union which is 
secured by ‘‘abiding in Christ,” which in its turn is 
dependent on belief—belief that Jesus was what he 
claimed to be, the eternal Son of God. The grounds 
upon which the author shows that Jesus was worthy 
of such belief are certain trustworthy witnesses, of 
which we shall have more to say later. The initia- 
tion into mystical union with God through Christ is 
a new-bitth experience which is characterized as being 
“born of the Spirit.” The work of the Spirit is to 
continue that of Jesus and the coming of the Spirit 
is made coincident with the end of Jesus’s earthly life. 
Such a view of the life of Jesus centers thought 
upon its abiding value in the life of man and shifts 
the center of interest from his death and second com- 
ing to the larger concept of his continuous office as 
the mediator of life to men. His death was but the 
gateway through which he entered into a more inclu- 


30 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


sive, more completely pervasive relationship with man- 
kind. The cardinal aim of the writer thus reveals 
itself as the establishing of the universal and spiritual 
aspects of the mission of Jesus as revealer of God and 
mediator of Life to men. 

In pursuance of this aim, the author has confessedly 
made his own selection from the things that might 
have been related about Jesus. It is a deliberately 
selective process, with the aim of commending the 
author’s own personal religious experience to others. 
“Many other signs, therefore, did Jesus in the pres- 
ence of the disciples, which are not written in this 
book: but these things are written that ye may believe 
that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that 
believing ye may have life in his name.” ? 

In this general scheme of thought, there is evident 
an insistent emphasis upon “‘knowledge”’ and “‘belief” 
as essential factors in the religious experience which 
he advocates. ‘The explicit purpose of the Gospel 
brings forward this challenge to belief: ““These things 
are written that ye may believe.” 

The only epigrammatic definition of religion which 
the author essays is in terms of knowledge: “This is 
life eternal, that they should know Thee, the only 
true God, and Him whom Thou didst send, even Jesus 
Christ.” ® ‘Truth is given a central position as the 
great liberator of mankind. “Ye shall know the truth 
and truth shall make you free.” 4 

The course of the narrative through Chapter xii. 
—the section which deals with Jesus’s contacts with 
the world at large, in distinction from the intimate 
fellowship with the inner group—is a chronicle of 
successive occasions upon which individuals, or groups 
of individuals, “‘believe” or fail to ‘“‘believe” that he 


9 Xxx. 31. ® xvii. 3. * viii. 32. 


ITS JOHANNINE USE a 


was what he claimed to be. John the Baptist, Nico- 
demus, the woman of Samaria, “many of the rulers,” 
the Galileans, certain Greeks, and even “many of the 
Jews” are successively reported as “believing,” while 
on the other hand is arrayed the relentless disbelief 
of “the Jews” as a whole. 

But we must examine more closely the evangelist’s 
handling of the concept “knowledge,” and we need 
some acquaintance with the characteristic vocabulary 
of the author as it bears upon the concept and upon 
those that are closely related to it. 

Certain striking omissions should first be noted. * In 
spite of the evangelist’s emphasis on belief as a con- 
dition of salvation, and his definition of religion as 
fundamentally a knowing process, he does not employ 
either of the two nouns which Paul uses in this con- 
text, and which we should so naturally expect, yvd@otcs 
and glotis- Also absent are yvoun, judgment in 
the sense of a decision or opinion, medvyua, mind— 
the mind of the flesh and the mind of the spirit of 
Romans viii, copa, wisdom, and godvuios, wise, 
the adjective so loved by Matthew. 

Abbott ® explains the absence of the noun “faith” 
and the compensating abundant use of the verb “be- 
lieve” on the ground that the great access of wonder- 
working faith in the Christian community demanded 
explanation of the grounds for holding it, rather than 
further affirmation that it existed. “The appropriate 
vocabulary for the answers to the questions arising, 
such as ‘““Why do you believe?” “What or whom do 
you believe?’ was the one chosen by the evangelist. 
The substitution of the verb for the Synoptic and 
Pauline noun gave a chance for the expression of the 
object and hence gave a phrase with fuller content 

* Abbott, Johannine Vocabulary, London, 1905, p. 22. 


32 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


than the noun alone could give. The absence of the ' 
noun yvd@ous, we shall presently see, may have been a 
purposeful avoidance of a term whose ordinary conno- 
tations were unsatisfactory to the writer. 

‘The characteristic expressions used by the Fourth 
Gospel which have to do with the knowledge aspect 
of religious experience are the following: 


In the prologue, 6 Advos: 

The noun GA eta, truth; and its two cognate ad- 
jectives GAINS and dAndivdc : 

The verb ziotet, to believe, with its nearly synony- 
mous parallel, Aau6dva, to receive: 

The verb pagtugéw, to witness: 

The noun pagtveta, witness: 

The two verbs ofSq, and yivaoxw, to know. 


The relationship of the Logos concept to our prob- 
lem will be discussed in a later section of this study. 
Here, as we are examining the author’s vocabulary, 
we need only note that the term “Logos” with philo- 
sophical connotations occurs only in the prologue in 
which the author has given himself the task of creat- 
ing a favorable attitude of mind on the part of his 
readers for the understanding of the message which 
he is about to unfold. In compact, oracular utterances, 
he has here summarized the fundamental positions 
which the Gospel is to elaborate. 

The historic Logos concept has a dramatic function 
to perform. It is introduced without explanation, as 
current coin in the thought of the day, and does not 
occur again in the Gospel, although the ideas for 
which it stands are repeatedly used, closely assimi- 
lated into the thought of the Gospel. Its place in 
the whole fabric of the author’s trend of thought will 
be considered later. Here we need only pause to note 


ITS JOHANNINE USE 33 


the significance of the fact that the author chose as 
his dramatic key-word which should commend his Gos- 
pel to its world, the one which had stood in the 
history of philosophy for the rational principle in the 
cosmic process. 

The repeated use of the noun GAy feta and its cog- 
nate adjectives dAynbivds and diythjc is significant 
for our study. The prologue sounds the note which 
the Gospel is to take up: 


The Word . . . full of grace and truth.° 
Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.’ 


In the fifteen cases which follow in the Gospel 
proper of the use of the noun “truth,” three refer 
to the Comforter who is the Spirit of Truth and 
whose office is to lead the believer into Truth; six 
have reference to the believer as doing or knowing 
_the Truth. To worship rightly, one must worship in 
spirit and in truth. The truth is to make one free. 
Six refer to truth as it is related to Jesus himself. 
He is Truth; he speaks the truth; it was the purpose 
of his coming into the world, to bear witness of the 
truth. 

At first sight, one is inclined to interpret the “grace 
and truth’ of the prologue as the traditional M287 7E0 
(mercy and truth) of the Old Testament,® but closer 
examination reveals that it is no mere reflection of 
that usage. The Septuagint rarely translates M2XT7ON 
with ydgus xal ddrjdern but repeatedly with #heoc xol 
GAysera. ‘This is an independent correlation of ideas, 
not a mere inheritance. Here “grace and truth” are 
in sharp contrast to the law as given by Moses. ‘They 
indicate phases of the divine nature, divine gifts medi- 

Sie 14: 7h. 17. 

*Pss. Ixxxix. 14; Ixxxv. 10; II Sam. xv. 20. 


34 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


ated to men as result of the incarnation of the Logos, 
and are manifestations of the new spiritual birth 
through him. 

It is significant that ydous, which is a favorite 
Pauline word, is not used in our Gospel except in 
these instances in the prologue, while GAn evan appears 
repeatedly. “Truth” as an integral and inherent fac- 
tor in the divine life becomes, in the usage of the 
Gospel, that which is reality; in short, is concerned 
not with the ethical but with the philosophical aspects 
of religion. 

Truth came through the incarnation of the Logos; 
believers are to know the truth and by the truth they 
are to be set free; they are to worship God in truth; 
Jesus has told them the truth; and at his death, the 
Spirit of ‘Truth is to guide them into all truth. 

The adjectives Giydiwés and ddntijg are used with 
kindred notions back of them. Jesus is the true vine. 
He gives the true bread to his disciples. His witness 
is true. With the exception of vii. 18 where “being 
true’ is made parallel with righteousness— 


“But he that seeketh the glory of him that sent him, 
the same is true, and no unrighteousness is in him”— 


there is no ethical content in the term, but rather a 
philosophical one, as was the case with the noun. 

There is no hortatory note in their use, no urging 
to truth-telling or to honest dealing, no counsel to 
be true. The terms are expository rather than admon- 
itory, showing the interest of the author in commend- 
ing his message as philosophically sound. It is the 
genuineness of the revelation of the divine Life given 
by Jesus that he is at pains to demonstrate. ‘“‘He 
that sent me is true.” ® . 

* vii. 28. 


ITS JOHANNINE USE 35 


Closely related to these words which indicate the 
soundness of the author’s message, are the noun paetvola 
and the verb paotveéw. Of the thirteen instances in 
the Gospel of the adjective GAn is, seven are used 
to modify the noun yagtuegia. John the Baptist bears 
witness to Jesus, and Jesus affirms that the witness 
which John has given is trustworthy. The scriptures, 
his own words, his works, the Spirit of Truth, and 
God himself all bear testimony to the fact that Jesus 
is what he claims to be, the Son of God and the 
mediator of the divine life.?° 

‘Thus far, the examination of the vocabulary would 
lead us to the opinion that the atmosphere of the 
religious life which the Gospel portrays is one in which 
genuineness and trustworthiness are values to be prized. 
Its primary value is reality. In the field of religious 
experience it matters to the author whether the indi- 
vidual can give a rational assent to the propositions 
upon which religious experience is founded. 

But the author’s use of the verb “to believe” is 
perhaps more revealing of this temper of his thought 
than any other one word. The word appears as a 
motif, the pattern, for which all the warp and woof 
of his writing is designed as background. There are 
only two chapters in the Gospel proper, in which this 
verb does not appear—nearly one hundred instances in 
all—and the figure is considerably increased by the 
recognition that in several cases the verb Jap6avw 
serves aS a synonym. 


“T am come in my Father’s name and ye receive me 
not.” # 


* Cf. Inge, Art. “Gospel of John,” in the Dictionary of 
Christ and the Gospels,1 pp. 692-3. 
Ay. 43. 


36 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


The prevailing construction with the verb muotetw 
is the preposition gi¢ with the personal accusative fol- 
lowing. 


“But of the multitude, many believed on him.” ® 
“Believe in God: believe also in me.” * 


But the verb is also used without object: 


“Jesus said unto him, Except ye see signs and wonders, 
ye will in no wise believe;” “ | 


or with a clause as object introduced by 611: 


“And they believed that Thou didst send me.”” 
“Believest thou not that I am in the Father and the 
Father in me?” * 


The steady recurrence of this verb, the insistent 
reiteration of the idea that the essence of religion is 
the acceptance of the belief that Jesus actually was 
what he claimed to be, and conversely that failure to 
believe constitutes the rejection of Life,!’ the setting 
of the whole Gospel into a framework which shows 
Jesus either calling out belief from his contemporaries, 
or failing to win them because perversely they will 
not believe, is significant of the author’s desire that 
his narrative shall commend a rational appreciation 
of the life and work of Jesus. 

But we must not seem to fall into the error of 
assuming that Life, or the essence of religion, for the 
Johannine author is merely intellectual assent to a 
proposition. Belief and Love are two inseparable prin- 
ciples and their parallel relationship is steadily afirmed, 


4 vii. 31. * iv. 48. *° xiv. 10. 
bate sh gh eK VIN. ™ xvi. 9. 


ITS JOHANNINE USE 37 


but with heightened emphasis in the discourses to the 
disciples, after Chapter xii. 


“By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, 
if ye love one another.” * 


“These things I command you that ye may love one 
another.” ” 


Ethical attitudes and conduct are-integrally related 
to the acceptance of the new Life mediated through 
Jesus. 


“But he that doeth the truth cometh to the Light that 
his works may be made manifest that they have been 
wrought in God.” 


That which is pressing for recognition, however, 
throughout the Gospel is the fact that belief in Jesus 
as the Son of God is the fundamental and initial 
condition upon which man receives the new birth into 
eternal life. Other factors are there, but this is basal, 
belief that Jesus was the Son of God and the medi- 
ator of Life. 

Thus far the study of the vocabulary of the Gos- 
pel has but given us the milieu for that which is 
pivotal in‘ our study. This examination has let us 
see that characteristically the author thinks in terms 
which seem to indicate an appeal for intellectual values 
in religious experience. But our concern is specifically 
with the words with which he handles his concept of 
“knowledge.” And to that study we must turn. 

The verbs of knowing in the Fourth Gospel are 
otda, to know, yivaoxw, to come to know, and 
“yvwottw, to make known. ‘The larger number of 
instances of the verb ywaoxw deal with the funda- 
mental position to which the Gospel has committed 


* xiii. 35. xv. 17. Till.2%: 


38 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


itself, the recognition of the claims of Jesus. Only a 
few examples need be given. They merely substan- 
tiate the point which emerged in our consideration of 
the verb “to believe’: 


“We have believed and know that thou art the Holy 
One of God.” * 

“Tf I do them (the works of my Father), though ye 
believe not me, believe the works: that ye may know 


and understand that the Father is in me and I in the 
Father.” * 


The verb ywwaoxw is also used with reference to the 
words and works of Jesus, “knowing” in the sense 
of understanding the content of his teaching. Typical 
of such use are the following passages: 


“Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make 
you free.” ” 

“Why do ye not understand (know) my speech?” ™ 

“What I do, thou knowest not now, but thou shalt 
understand hereafter.” * 


The use of otSq@ does not demand special comment 
except to note that only three times does it occur to 
denote the recognition of the claims of Jesus; in con- 
nection with Nicodemus,** the Samaritan woman,?? 
and Martha.?* Most frequently it is applied to Jesus’s 
complete knowledge of situations and people, indicat- 
ing his complete control over both, and his self-deter- 
mination. 

But we are particularly concerned with the concept 
of knowing as applied to God. This is the Johannine 
definition of religion, that man should know God and 
Jesus whom God sent. This assumption of knowledge 
of God as fundamental in religion appears also in the 
vi. 69. * viii. 32. SAL dh ee 
x88, * viii. 43 2 iii. 2. * xi. 32. 


ITS JOHANNINE USE 39 


discourse about the children of Abraham. The chil- 
dren of Abraham say that He is their God: 


“Ye have not known him, but I know him... and 
I keep his word.” ” 


Jesus affirms his own knowledge of God: 


“Even as the Father knoweth me and I know him.” ” 


He also asserts that to know him is to know God: 


“Tf ye had known me, ye would have known the Father 
also: from henceforth ye know him and have seen him.” * 


Rejection of Christianity is put in terms of not know- 
ing God: 

“These things will they do (persecution of the dis- 
ciples) because they have not known the Father nor 
me.” 32 
In Chapter viii. 55 the evangelist has used both verbs 
olda and yiv@oxw to point out the difference be- 
tween the believer’s knowledge of God and that of 
Jesus which is full and complete. 

What emerges from the examination of the hand- 
ling of the concept in the Gospel thus far is a con- 
viction that both “belief” and “knowledge” are given 
a heavy emphasis in the formulation of religion in the 
Fourth Gospel, so heavy that we must consider them 
basal in the author’s thinking. Salvation, the new 
birth, is conditioned upon belief that Jesus was the 
Son of God, and eternal life is a quality of living 
which is characterized by knowledge of God as medi- 
ated to man through Jesus. Jesus knew God perfectly, 
and he who knows Jesus knows God also. That 
knowledge is indissolubly bound up with rightness of 


2 eee . . 
* vill. 55. wt: oa) Le * xiv. 7. ” xvi. 3. 


‘fe 


40 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


living, and love in the beloved community is but the 
other side of the same shield. 

What the actual content of the term “knowledge” 
is in the writer’s mind does not yet appear. He has 
given no passage descriptive of his theory of knowl- 
edge, and indeed the merest beginnings of epistemo- 
logical theory were all that that age knew. Our 
author could not dream of any analysis which should 
demarcate the avenues by which the mind apprehends 
truth. Our only means for understanding what the 
concept stood for in his mind, as a rational or emo- 
tional experience, is to see the concept in its larger 
context. 7 

But perhaps we shall not go too far if we say that 
the study of the vocabulary in the Fourth Gospel 
would put the presuppositions on the side of a rational 
or reflective content in the term “knowledge.” Com- 
pared with the emotional content, for example, of the 
term “faith” in the Pauline writings, we find here 
a more reflective element which calls for recognition. 
At least, the author has put the concept in a general 
setting which asks for rational appreciation of the 
claims of Jesus and tends to emphasize the philosophi- 
cal soundness of the Gospel as a whole. 

There could be no genuine appreciation of the 
Fourth Gospel mysticism, however, without a recog- 
nition that the religious experience which the writer 
is eager to share is a totality of life. It is not a set 
of doctrines, to which he asks assent; it is not exclu- 
sively an emotional experience which he wishes his 
readers to reproduce through the channels of intuitive 
life. It is not a set of activities performed which he 
wishes his readers to imitate. 

It is rather a great personal religious experience, 
involving his own whole nature, which he seeks to 


ITS JOHANNINE USE 41 


make possible for others. The rational acceptance of 
the historical life of Jesus as symbol, and more than 
symbol of the divine in human life, has opened the 
door to divine life in his own experience. That divine 
life he feels as the branch feels the life of the vine. 
It is the nourishment of spiritual existence as bread 
and water are the sustenance of the body. 

It floods living with light. It makes life abundant 
and eternal. It finds its fruit in right conduct and in 
love to man. It is the totality of living in its emo- 
tional, intellectual, and conative aspects, lifted to its 
highest level. Not even the social aspects of living are 
omitted in the mysticism of this writer. ‘The con- 
trolling idea, to be sure, is of the importance of indi- 
vidual religious experience. Eternal life is the indi- 
vidual’s mystical union with God through Christ. But 
the close juxtaposition of the Love and Belief con- 
cepts, the commands of Jesus, urging love of the 
brethren,** keep the social ideal in view. 

Most significant is the scene in which Jesus washes 
the disciples’ feet,3* as. a symbolic act, teaching that 
loving service is the basis of their fellowship. ‘The 
farewell discourses urge a basis of love within the 
beloved community, as the central bond of their union. 

But that this social ideal is not the primary one 
in the author’s mind is evidenced by the fact that it 
is presented not as an end in itself but as a means 
toward the achievement of the individual’s union with 
Christ. The word “kingdom” appears only twice in 
the Gospel,*> and then almost completely divested of 
its Synoptic content. In both cases it is more a cir- 
cumlocution for the idea of the saving work of the 
person of Christ than it is a designation for a social 

8 xv. 12-13; xili. 34; XV. 17. 

4 xiii, 5-11. * iii. 3-5; xviii. 36. 


42 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


concept. The ultimate aim of the evangelist is not 
to urge a social salvation as such, but he finds the 
spirit of love and service within the beloved com- 
munity an essential factor in that relationship to Christ 
which is eternal life. ‘The correlation of these two 
aspects of life in the mysticism of the Fourth Gospel 
is admirably discussed by Miss Underhill.*® She says: 


“The promise of the Paraclete, the coming of the 
exalted Christ, the eucharistic discourses are so many 
artistic presentations of this same thing: the participa- 
tion of the regenerate human consciousness in Eternal 
Life. John knew this by practical experience; and try- 
ing to express it, sometimes resorted to one image and 
sometimes to another. It is impossible to extract a con- 
sistent, dogmatic system from his utterance, for though 
he sometimes tries to be a theologian, he remains at 
heart a realist and a poet. 

“In the end, all philosophical language came to seem 
to him inadequate, and he resorted as so many mystics 
after him to the heart’s intuition of its Home and Father, 
‘that dim silence where lovers lose themselves,’ as the 
only definition of God which did not defeat its own end. 
‘We have known and have believed the love that God’ 
hath for us. God is love and he that dwelleth in love 
dwelleth in God and God in him.’ This, which was des- 
tined to be one of the fundamental ideas of Christian 
mysticism, which fought and conquered the Neo-platonic 
concept of God as the supreme object of knowledge and 
contemplation as a ‘gnostic’ act, was John’s most char- 
acteristic contribution to the interpretation of the Chris- 
tian life. His was the piercing vision that discovered that 
the Spirit of Love is one with the Spirit of Truth, and 
that only those who love will ever understand.” ; 


With full recognition of this manifold character of 
the mysticism of the Fourth Gospel, we discover in 


Evelyn Underhill, The Mystic Way, Dent, 1913, p. 252. 


ITS JOHANNINE USE 43 


the handling of the “knowledge” concept as it figures 
in religious experience, a pressure in the mind of the 
author for recognition of reflective elements. ‘This 
pressure reveals itself (1) by his steady insistence 
upon belief in the claims of Jesus as basal in reli- 
gious experience, (2:) by his frequent appeals to wit- 
ness, or testimony upon which such a belief may rest, 
(3) by the identification of Truth with the heart of 
his message, and the emphasis upon the philosophical 
soundness of the religious experience which he advo- 
cates. 

This is but a glimpse of the handling of the con- 
cept in the Gospel. It is merely the external setting 
which we have seen. We need closer examination of 
both the content and the process of the “knowledge” 
side of this mystical experience. But before we direct 
ourselves to closer inquiry within the Gospel itself, 
we may profitably turn to the environment in which 
the Gospel arose, to see how in other religious sys- 
tems which the author may have touched, the concept 
“knowledge” was handled. 

By such a study, we should gain some light on the 
question of the motivation for the concept in our Gos- 
pel. If we can see the concept in the Gospel as re- 
action, either favorable or unfavorable to the world 
of thought which surrounded the author, we shall be 
in a better position to estimate the actual content of 
the experience in the mind of the Johannine writer. 


III 
ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 


(1) In Historic Judaism 


HE evidence for presupposing a _ general 
background of Jewish thought behind the 
Fourth Gospel has been frequently assembled. 
Strachan, Westcott, Drummond and others have 
pointed to the author’s familiarity with the ideas and 
customs of Judaism, have cited his appeal to the Old 
Testament Scriptures, and have called attention to his 
Semitic modes of expression in asserting their claim 
to the Jewish authorship of the Gospel. 

Whether one accepts or rejects their conclusion, 
one cannot but accept the truth of their premise that 
the author was familiar with and the user of much 
that was Jewish in thought and expression. And since 
that is the case, we naturally wish to press the ques- 
tion as to whether the author found in historic Juda- 
ism the influences which tended to produce the empha- 
sis upon “knowledge of God” which we have been 
examining. How does the concept figure in Hebrew 
religious thought? 

In general, the religious interests of the Hebrews, 
as they reveal themselves to us in the Old Testament 
writings, were practical rather than philosophical. 
Their history, their law, their songs, their prophecy, 
all reveal the pragmatic rather than the speculative 
interests of religion. Only in the Wisdom literature 


44 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 45 


is there evident the dawning of philosophical thinking, 
and even there the concern is rather with morals, the 
practical everyday urge toward the good life, than 
with any metaphysical speculation about man and his 
relation to the universe or to God. 

The early stages of Hebrew religion, moreover, had 
a national rather than an individual focus. Recogni- 
tion of Jahweh as the protector and guide of the 
nation was its keynote. Josephus commented upon this. 
characteristic of Hebrew religion as follows: ‘Our 
law-giver ordained our government to be what, by a 
strained expression, may be termed a theocracy, ascrib- 
ing the sovereignty and authority to God.” + 

This description of the primitive legal formulation 
of early times holds good not only for that era but 
for the centuries which followed it. Israel’s religion 
in its beginnings was an affair of the nation rather 
than of the individual. The covenant relation stressed 
by all four of the Pentateuchal strands of writing gave 
ethical content to its national bond, and in this they 
were distinguished from contemporary tribal or 
national religions which stressed the tie of blood as of 
supreme importance. It was a compact between God 
and the nation, and personal religion was submerged 
in the social bond. 

For purposes of our study, then, we may dismiss 
as irrelevant such uses of the Hebrew verb 9D 
(to know), applied to Jahweh, as appear in the early 
strands of writing, of which Exodus vi.7 is typical: 

“And I will take you to me for my people and will 
be to you a God and ye shall know that I am Jehovah 
your God.” ” 

* Apion, II, 17; Whiston’s translation, Bohn’s Standard 


Library, London, 1890, p. 241. 
?So also Exod. vii. 17; viii.22; x.2; xiv. 18; xvi. 12. 


46 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


Recognition that Jahweh is their Deity and commands 
their allegiance as a nation is all that is implied here. 
In Judges, national defection is described as failure to 


know God. 
“There arose another generation which knew not God”; 


and in I Samuel the figure is carried over into indi- 
vidual life, to indicate moral deficiency on the part 
of an individual, but no personal.relationship between 
the individual and God is implied: 


“Now the sons of Eli were base men; they knew not 
Jehovah.” ° 


In the early stages of Hebrew religion as it is reflected 
in the writings of the Old Testament, there is no 
thought of any relationship between God and man, 
individual enough to serve even as a basis of com- 
parison with a mystical expression of religion where 
individual values are paramount. 

It is in the prophetic period that the beginnings of 
individualized religious experience make their appear- 
ance in Hebrew religion, but even here the first con- 
cern is social experience rather than individual. “Let 
justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a 
mighty stream,” * is typical not only of Amos but of 
the teaching of the writing prophets as a group. Ethi- 
cal relationships in daily life are the first concern of 
prophetic religion. 

But as spokesman for Jahweh, the prophet himself 
often appears as exponent of an individual mystical 
experience. Amos, disclaiming any professional 
prophetism, cried out: 

“Tt was a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore-trees 
and Jehovah took me from following after the flock and 


*I Sam. ii. 32. * Amos vy. 24. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 47 


Jehovah said unto me: Go prophesy unto my people 
Israel.” ° 


Jeremiah, reluctant to undertake the prophetic office, 
had some personal religious experience which convinced 
him that Jehovah had called him from his birth, and 
when the hand of the Lord reached out and touched 
his mouth, he was constrained to speak.® Isaiah with 
his great vision in the temple, Ezekiel with his trances, 
Zechariah with his symbolic visions, all were conscious 
of intimate personal relations with God of such a 
nature that they felt competent to speak as the repre- 
sentatives of God to the people. The regular phenom- 
ena of “vision and voice” of mystical experience are 
repeatedly cited by the prophets as evidence that they 
themselves have been in immediate contact with deity 
and are empowered to speak the will of God to the 
people. 

But not merely in the personal experiences of the 
prophets themselves do we find traces of individual- 
ized religious experience. ‘The actual teaching of the ° 
prophets shows a reaching out toward the conception 
that knowledge of God is not only necessary as a 
basis for the national covenant relation, but essential 
as a spur to the individual for his performance of 
those duties which constitute his side of the ethical 
bond. Here it is not always easy to distinguish be- 
tween the individual and the social emphasis in the 
writer's thought, and, at best, we have only occasional 
flashes of insight that glimpse the individual relation- 
ship. It is by no means a settled current of thinking, 
nor is it clearly defined in the minds of the writers. 

Such hints that “knowledge of God” is a personal 
as well as a national experience appear in Hosea’s 


° Amos vii. 14-15. *Jer. i. 9. 


48 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


writing. Hosea affirmed that the people were being 
destroyed for lack of knowledge” and analyzed the 
corruption of his day as due to the fact that “there 
is no truth, nor goodness, nor knowledge of God in 
the land.” ® His contrast between the ethical and the 
cultic expressions of religion implies that the ethical 
is based upon knowledge of God: 


“For I desire goodness and not sacrifice, and the knowl- 
edge of God more than burnt-offerings.” ° 


In every case where Hosea uses the concept of ‘‘knowl- 
edge of God,” he has linked with it some notion of 
the ethical expression of religion, which would lead 
us to think that he has in mind rather the apprehen- 
sion of the moral nature of God than an individual 
experience of God which could be termed mystical in 
nature. The correlation is shown in the following 
chart. 


“There is no knowledge There is nought but 
of God in the land. swearing and breaking 
faith, and killing and 
stealing and commit- 

ting adultery. 


My people are destroyed seeing thou hast forgot- 
for lack of knowledge, ten the law of thy 
God. 
I desire goodness and not But they like Adam have 
sacrifice and the knowl- transgressed the cov- 
edge of God more than enant.” 


burnt-offerings. 


Apprehension of the moral nature of God would com- 
pel an ethical program of life, and we should leave 


* Hos. iv. 6. tive x ° vi. 6. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 49 


it here, were it not for the general context into which 
the correlation of ideas is set. “This God whose moral 
nature acts as a compulsion upon life is also a God of 
infinite tenderness and yearning toward his people. 
The figures under which Hosea portrays that love are: 
the figures of individual human relationships. 


“When Israel was a child, I knew him.”’® 


“How shall I give thee up, Ephraim?’ * 


Without the picture of Jahweh, tender, yearning, lov- 
ing even through the unfaithfulness of his erring 
people, the prophet’s scroll is not complete. It is the 
nation over which Jahweh yearns, not the individual, 
but perhaps it is not too fanciful to see in the tender 
relationships, here pictured of father and child, hus- 
band and wife, a foreshadowing of more individualized 
concepts of religious experience. 

In Isaiah a mere suggestion of the same reaching 
out toward personal knowledge of God is found in 
his call for the spirit of knowledge and of the fear 
of Jehovah in the national deliverer,’? and in the two 
passages which attribute the misfortune of the people 
to their lack of knowledge of the ways of Jahweh.1? 
But in Ezekiel’s oft-recurring formula, “that they may 
know that I am Jahweh,’** the thought is wholly 
that of the social recognition of God as sovereign and 
lord. As Kautzsch has explained: 


“This is as much as to say that my absolute omni- 
potence, my absolute sovereignty over all the peoples of 
the earth, my inviolable holiness may be brought to their 
consciousness.” » 


ats ie «ee 


™Isa.xi.2. “v.13; 1.3. “Ezek. xxix. 21; xxx. 26, etc. 
*Kautzsch, Art. The Religion of Israel, Hastings’ Dic- 
tionary of the Bible, Extra Vol., p. 702. 


50 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


It is the old formal recognition of Jahweh as the 
national Deity with no hint of any individual knowl- 
edge which constitutes the basis of mystical religion. 

Deutero-Isaiah’s impassioned cry for understanding 
of the relationship of Jahweh to his creation brings 
a blending of the idea of a formal recognition of the 
sovereignty of Jahweh, with an Relators of his 
tenderness to man: 


“Have ye not known? Have ye not heard? Hath it 
not been told you from the beginning? Have ye not 
understood from the foundations of the earth? . .. It 
is he that sitteth above the circle of the earth. Hast 
thou not known? Hast thou not heard? The everlast- 
ing God, Jehovah, the Creator of the ends of the earth, 
fainteth not neither is weary. He giveth power to the 
faint, and to him that hath no might, he increaseth 
strength.” 


It is with the prophet Jeremiah that we find the 
closest affiliations with the concept with which we 
are concerned; the shy, sensitive poet-prophet, whose 
tender sympathy with mankind, whose deep spiritual 
understanding have given him the place of preémi- 
nence among the Hebrew prophets. Suffering intensely 
with the knowledge that the people “‘proceed from 
evil to evil” and know not Jehovah,’ he urges that the 
wise man shall not glory in his wisdom, nor the mighty 
man in his might, nor the rich man in his riches; 


“But let him that glorieth, glory in this, that he hath 
understanding and knoweth me, that I am Jehovah who 
exerciseth loving-kindness, justice, and righteousness in 
the earth: for in these things I delight, saith Jehovah.” * 


* Isa. xl. 21 ff. “Jer. ix. 3. * ix. 23-24. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 51 


This is an essentially different concept from the recog- 
nition of Jahweh as tribal Deity, and if it does not 
pass over into the realm of mystical experience, it is 
at least on the road to it. It is individual apprecia- 
tion of the values for which Jahweh stands, knowl- 
edge of his ethical nature, and individual appropria- 
tion of those values in human life. 

Jeremiah represents Jahweh as saying that he will 
give the people a heart to know him,?® and his finest 
vision of the future brings him closest to the concept 
which we have before us for study. As he looked into 
the future, he saw the perfect relationship between 
man and God, as fellowship, communion, based upon 
man’s knowledge of God, and expressing itself in 
ethical fruits which were the natural result of that 
spiritual kinship: 


“And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, 
saying Know Jehovah; for they shall all know me from 
the least of them unto the greatest of them saith Jehovah; 
for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin will I 
remember no more.” ”™ 


With such a view, the Fourth Gospel writer would 
not have been out of harmony. He has carried the 
idea much farther. With him it is an intensely per- 
sonal relationship; it is the constant mood of the soul; 
it is filled with a rich mystical and ethical content. 
Here, in the teaching of the prophet, it is a flash of 
insight, not sustained throughout; it is more diffuse, 
less personal, less mystical, and the ethical implications 
are only hinted, but for both, there is the claim that 
there is a fundamental quality in religious experience 
which consists in ‘knowing God,” and knowing Him 


* xxiv. 7. * xxxi. 34. 


52 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


directly without the mediation of any merely human 
teacher or friend. 

The Psalter gives many glimpses of genuinely per- 
sonal religious experience: 


“Jehovah is my light and my salvation; 
Whom shall I fear? 

Jehovah is the strength of my life; 
Of whom shall I be afraid?”™ 


“Cast me not away from they presence 
And take not thy holy spirit from me.’’™ 


“In thee, O Jehovah, do I take refuge.” ™ 


And particularly in Psalm Ixxiii,. 


“T am continually with Thee, 
Thou hast holden my right hand; 


aan have I in heaven but Thea? 
And there is none upon earth that I desire besides 
Thee,” ™ 


the sense of immediate communion with God is ex- 
pressed. There is one psalm of the late Persian or 
early Greek period,?° in which the parallelism of the 
Hebrew verse structure suggests that knowledge of the 
name of Jahweh is closely related to love of Him, and 
that both constitute a bond of fellowship between man 
and God: 


“Because he hath set his love upon me therefore will 
I deliver him: 


7 xxvii. 1. wb Poe & 3 xxxi. I. 

* Ixxiii. 25. Cf. Also Psalms xxiii, xxvi, xxviii. 

*Cf Briggs, The Psalms in I.C.C., p. 282; so dated also 
by Hitzig. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 53 


I will set him on high, because he hath known my 
name. 
He shall call upon me and I will answer him.”” 


The general context of the psalm shows that the indi- 
vidual relationship with God is the goal of religious 
experience in the poet’s mind, and here again, we find 
ourselves in an atmosphere of religious thought which 
if not parallel with that of the Fourth Gospel, is at 
least tending in its direction. 

The idea of “knowledge” as a factor in religious 
experience figures in canonical Hebrew writings in 
the wisdom concept, and while this idea is carried 
over and developed more fully in the extra-canonical 
writings of both Palestinian and Hellenistic Judaism, 
it will not be out of place for us to discuss it here 
as a unit. 

What the early Jewish sages meant by ‘“‘wisdom” 
was that practical common-sense which enables 
man to live a sane and balanced life. It was to 
be sought, not in and for itself as an abstract prin- 
ciple, but because, as piety, it secures the favor of God 
and all material blessings. It is concerned with the 
details of the daily round of life. Prudence, sagacity, 
virtue are all akin to it. Its motives are often on a 
low plane, merely self-interest and self-protection. In 
this earlier stage, wisdom has been described as a 
“kind of common-sense philosophy of life?’ with a 
strong religious flavor.” 2° 

As time went on, however, wisdom became a poetic 
personification and gathered to itself more philosophi- 
cal notions, and finally became a true hypostasy, in 

™ Ps. xci.14, 

7 Prov. ii. 3, 8-10; x.27; xvi.20. Ps, xxxvii, etc. 

* Quoted by W. T. Davidson in “Hebrew Wisdom” in 
Peake’s Commentary on the Bible, p. 343. 


54 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


which pious Jews saw a revelation of God himself. 
Proverbs viii represents a personification which has 
elements suggestive of something more than a mere 
literary figure, and in the Book of Wisdom, the hypos- 
tatization is unmistakable: 


“Wisdom is more mobile than any motion: 

Yea, she pervadeth and penetrateth all things by 
reason of her pureness. 

For she is a breath of the power of God, 

And a clear effluence of the glory of the Almighty: 

Therefore can nothing defiled find entrance into her. 

For she is an effulgence from everlasting light, 

And an unspotted mirror of the working of God, 

And an image of goodness. 

And she, though but one, hath power to do all things: 

And remaining in herself, reneweth all things; 

And from generation to generation passing into holy 
souls, 

She maketh them friends of God and prophets.” ” 


The preéxistence and the comprehensive work of wis- 
dom is indicated in Sirach: 


“He created me from the beginning before the world. 
The memorial of me shall never cease.” ™ 


“T came forth from the mouth of the Most High 
And as a mist I covered the earth.” * 


Like other quasi-hypostases of Judaistic thinking, such 
as the Word of God, the Glory of God, the Spirit 
of God, wisdom serves the need created by the con- 
cept of a transcendent God, of intermediary between 
God and man, and is itself a product of Greek influ- 
ence upon Hebrew thought. 


™ Wisd. of Sol. vii. 24-27. 
* Sir. xxiv. 9. * Sir. xxiv. 3. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 55 


As the concept touches our problem, its affiliations 
are not with the personal mysticism of the Gospel 
but with the formal introduction to it expressed 
through the Logos concept. ‘The complex relation- 
ships illustrated by that concept are a study by them- 
selves, and we must be content with only a glimpse at 
them. And since the gateway by which the Logos 
concept entered the Fourth Gospel thought was al- 
most unquestionably the religious philosophy of Philo, 
we shall find it convenient to treat the concept there 
in relation to Philo. 


Not in the formal hypostasy (for the hypostasy is 
itself an evidence of foreign influence upon Judaism) 
is characteristic Judaistic thinking represented in the 
thought of the Fourth Gospel. And, on the whole, 
the canonical Hebrew writings live in a different 
sphere of thought from that of the Fourth Gospel. 
Their practical interests, their concern with social 
rather than with individual religious experience give 
them a prevailingly non-mystical character. Only 
occasional instances of personal experience which may 
be characterized as mystical appear in the self-revela- 
tions of the prophets, and in the lyric expressions of 
the Psalms. 


Occasionally, also, prophetic teaching strikes a note 
which leads us toward the mystical. Notably in Jere- 
miah, the thought of “knowing God” as basal to the 
ethical expression of religion is made articulate and 
is given an individual emphasis through the figure of 
human relationships of tenderness and love. These are 
the sporadic beginnings of a temper of religious thought 
which when carried to full expression might express 
itself in the language of the Fourth Gospel: ‘“This is 
life eternal that they should know ‘Thee.’ 


56 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


(2) In Palestinian Judaism 


We have seen that canonical Hebrew writings offer . 
only faint foreshadowings of the mood which is char- 
acteristic of the Fourth Gospel, and we turn to the 
later period directly preceding the Christian era, and 
coincident with it, to see what religious development 
is there evidenced. Schiirer has pointed out that there 
were two main concerns upon the minds of Jews in 
the period directly preceding the beginning of Chris- 
tianity: zeal for the law of God, and the hope of a 
better future.t Pharisaism found itself represented by 
two schools of thought not, to be sure, antagonistic 
to each other, but one representing one of these em- 
phases at its height, and the other representing the 
other. 

Legalistic Pharisaism, which became the parent of 
Talmudic Judaism, was the exponent of the idea that 
correct observance of the law of God was the center 
of religion. Apocalyptic Judaism, which was the fore- 
runner of Christianity, concerned itself most definitely 
with the hope of a better future, apocalyptically con- 
ceived. ‘These interests figure in the literary expres- 
sions of religion in such concepts as the Messianic 
kingdom, the Messiah, the eternal validity of the Law, 
an increasingly transcendent notion of God with re- 
sultant intermediaries between God and man, and a 
future life for man conceived of in widely disparate 
ways. 

These controlling interests preclude any considerable 
development in the direction of mystical religion. But 


*Schiirer, The Jewish People in the Time of Christ, Div. 
II, Vol. III, p. 1. 

Cf. Charles, Religious Development between the Testa- 
ments, Pp. 33- 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 57 


certain trends of thought which appear in the writ- 
ings of this period in Palestine appear to be leading 
in a direction which will make possible mystical de- 
velopment therefrom. 

The Palestinian writings of this period exhibit an 
increasing tendency toward universalism. The old par- 
ticularistic emphasis of historic Judaism had tended to 
bring national religion to the fore and to suppress 
the development of individual religion. Some protests 
against the particularistic emphasis appear, notably in 
the prophetic writings, but in the late Palestinian writ- 
ings universalism gradually displaces the older notion. 

Even here the earlier documents are not released 
from the particularistic notion. The Book of Jubilees 
holds it a crime punishable by death to marry a Gen- 
tile, and the man who gives his daughter in marriage 
to a Gentile is held worthy to be stoned to death.? 
And Sirach, though not wholly bound to the narrow 
view,® still sees Israel, as Jubilees does, the central 
nation upon earth. 


“For every nation he appointeth a ruler, 
But Israel is the Lord’s portion.” * 


“For there are many nations and many peoples, and 
all are His, and over all hath He placed spirits in 
authority to lead them astray from Him. But over 
Israel He did not appoint any angel or spirit, for He 
alone is their ruler, and He will preserve them and 
require them at the hand of His angels and His spirits 
and at the hand of all His powers in order that He 
may preserve them and bless them and that they may 
be His and He may be theirs from henceforth forever.” ° 
But the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, which 


? Jub. xxx. 7. * Sir. xvii. 17. 
® Sir. xviii. 13-14. 5 Jub. xv. 31-32. 


58 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


Charles dates 109-107 B.c.,° only a little later than the 
Book of Jubilees, sounds a strong universalistic note, and 
the later additions to the book are in the same spirit: 


“And by thee and Judah shall the Lord appear among 
men, saving every race of men.” * 


“He [God] shall save Israel and all the Gentiles.” ® 


“The light of the law which was given to lighten 
every man.”° 


Aboth,® the latest in compilation of the Palestinian 
writings before the Rabbinic era, places no restrictions 
on the love of God to man. 


“Beloved is man that was created in the image of 


God.” 11 


Such a direction of thought, away from the par- > 
ticularistic, national emphasis in religion, is a neces- 
sary prerequisite for the growth of any settled mys-” 
tical temper of mind. Certain individuals in historic 
Judaism had achieved that step, and some had gone 
far enough to take on something approaching a mys- 
tical religious attitude, but universalism did not 
become a habit of thought until this later period. 
Palestinian Judaism does not take the further step 
into genuinely mystical concepts, but it has built the 
bridge without which the step could not be taken. 


* Charles, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Vol. Il, p. 289. 

* Test. of Levi, ii. 11. 

* Test. of Ash, vii. 3. 

° Test. of Levi, xiv. 4. 

* Aboth as a compilation was not complete until c.200 
A.D., but its material covers a period of from three to four 
centuries. 

* Aboth, iii. 19. 


ITS. USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 59 


In the second place, the extra-canonical Palestinian 
literature evidences an increasing recognition of the 
place of the individual in the cosmic scheme. ‘This is‘ 
but the necessary corollary of the universal interest. 
Bousset has shown how the personal religious empha- 
sis which we have seen expressed in the Psalms and 
some of the prophets had suffered during the Macca- 
bean period through the inevitable discouragement that 
followed upon suffering and distress, but how after the 
Maccabean period it arose in new garb, now united 
with an eschatological purpose.!2 Charles cites as one 
of the outstanding characteristics of the apocalyptic 
school of writers, this uniting of the ideas of the des- 
tiny of the nation and the destiny of the individual, 
and shows that the emergence from this synthesis was 
the doctrine of the resurrection, a genuine achievement 
of late Jewish thought.7% 

How truly this concept of a future life for the indi- 
vidual is a product of the apocalyptic school of think- 
ers is evident in the fact that it figures in canonical 
Old Testament writings only in Job (and there only 
indirectly) 14 and in Isaiah and Daniel,?® in both of 
which latter cases, the passages are truly apocalyptic 
in spirit. It comes forward boldly in the later Pales- 
tinian writings in the Testaments of the Twelve 
Patriarchs, in the Book of Jubilees, in the Psalms of 
Solomon, in the Assumption of Moses, and in 
IT Baruch. 


“Bousset, Die Religion des Judentums im Neutestament- 
lichen Zeitalter, 1903, p. 279. 

“Charles, Religious Development between the Testa- 
ments, Pp. I1O-I17. 

“Job xiv. 13-15; xix. 25-27. 

“Isaiah xxvi. 14,19; Dan. xii. 2, 3, 13. 


60 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


“In what shape will those live who live in that day? 
Or how will the splendor of those who are after that 
time continue?” * 


“They who hold fast to Him are for the life of 
eternity, and all the glory of man is for them.” ™ 


Again, the writings now under consideration do not 
take the step which brings the concept into direct 
relationship with the type of religious experience 
which is characteristic of the Fourth Gospel. They 
have not made this individual emphasis in religious 
experience take the form of a personal and direct com- 
munion with God, but they have shaped it to the inter- 
ests that were primary in that social order—release 
from present hardship either through apocalypticism or 
through a developed legalism. But they have made 
their contribution toward the later concept by freeing 
the individual from the social group and considering 
him as a unit worthy of, and capable of religious expe- 
rience apart from the status of the nation as a whole. 
In the third place, Palestinian Judaism in these 
centuries was building the way for Christian thought, 
and particularly that emphasis in Christian thought 
which was characteristic of the Fourth Gospel by its 
ethicizing and spiritualizing of religious values. There 
is a steady and unmistakable movement in the direction 
of the appreciation of the ethical and spiritual aspects of 
religion, which appears in the non-legalistic group of 
writings, as reaction from the cultic emphasis. ‘This 
tendency appears in the Psalms of Solomon: 


“Faithful is the Lord to them that love Him in truth, 

To them that endure His chastening, 

To them that walk in the righteousness of His com- 
mandments, 


TT Bar. xlix.2 ff. ™ Zadokite Work v. 6. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 61 


In the law which He commanded us that we might 
live.” © 


But in no one of the Palestinian pseudepigraphic 
works is this spiritualizing tendency more strikingly 
shown than in the Testament of the Twelve Patri- 
archs.1° In the famous passage on forgiveness the high 
ethical note is struck: 


“Love ye one another from the heart; and if a man 
sin against thee, speak peaceably to him, and in thy soul 
hold not guile, and if he repent and confess, forgive him. 
And if he deny it, do not get into a passion with him, 
lest catching the poison from thee, he take to swearing, 
and so thou sin doubly.” ” 


Twice the command is given to love the Lord and 
one’s neighbor,” and the closing words of Issachar’s 
testament bring forward both these aspects of religion: 


““T shared my bread with the poor. 
I wrought godliness; all my days I kept truth: 
I loved the Lord, 


Likewise also every man with all my heart.”™ 


Again, there is no projection of this mode of thought 
into the realm of true mystical experience, but there 


* Psalms of Sol. xiv. 1. 

The Testaments of the Twelve was never accepted offi- 
cially or otherwise by the Pharisees. It was never authori- 
tative save in certain circles of Pharisaic mystics who must 
in due time have found a congenial home in the bosom of 
the rising Christian church. .. . So little did the Pharisaic 
legalists . . . appreciate this work that they did not think it 
even worth preserving. For its preservation we are indebted 
to the Christian Church.” Charles, of. cit., p. 157. 

” Test. of Gad. vi. 3 ff. 

* Test. of Dan. v.3; and Test. of Iss, v.2. 

Test. of Iss. vii. 5-6. 


62 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


is a feeling after the concept that there is a connec- 
tion between man’s ethical life and his “love of God,” 
and that connection lies in the realm of individual 
experience. It is not a far step from this achievement 
to the realm of mysticism that is ethically conditioned. 

From the two main interests of Palestinian religion 
in the centuries which just preceded it, the Fourth 
Gospel definitely turned away. Its steady reiteration 
of the fact that “the Jews” were hostile to Jesus, its 
affirmation of the mystical values of personal fellow- 
ship in religion are testimony to its rejection of the 
legalistic emphasis in Palestinian Judaism, Its spir- 
itualizing of eschatological expectation shows its re- 
action from the materialistic hopes of the Palestinian 
apocalyptic school. 

To the author of the Fourth Gospel, eternal life 
is already the possession of the believer, who has re- 
ceived it by means of his spiritual rebirth into the 
truth. Death itself is no break in the continuity of 
existence, but merely a natural gateway into a fuller 
realization of what man now partially possesses. The 
second coming of Jesus was not to be outwardly mani- 
fest 2° but was to take place in the hearts of believers, 
an inward and spiritual presence, permanent, univer- 
sal, free from the limitations of Jesus’s earthly life.?* 
The judgment was not future and epochal, but a 
continuous process, present, automatic and involuntary, 
inward and spiritual on man’s part, dependent merely 
on man’s reaction to Jesus as revealer of Light.?5 

All this is a definite correction of Semitic eschato- 
logical ideas, a purposeful spiritualization of popular 
concepts. A few passages, to be sure, regarding the 
diet Sie and “the last day” seem to hold with the 


S slY) 17, 22, 23; XVi. 22; x. 16. * xiv. 3. 
* ib: 93/1485 Sle 15, 903 112. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 63 


older view,?* but these passages are usually treated 
as reflections of popular Christian dogma, not yet 
fully assimilated to the author’s own prevailing scheme 
of thought.?? 

On the whole, the Fourth Gospel presents itself as 
a reaction from these two characteristic emphases of 
Palestinian Judaism of the time. In certain subsidiary 
trends of thought, however, in its increasing emphasis 
on universalism, in its stress on the importance of 
the individual as a unit in religious experience, in its 
concern with the ethical and spiritual values of reli- 
gion, Palestinian Judaism appears at least a favorable 
soil for the growth of a mysticism which might ex- 
press itself in terms of personal knowledge of God. 

How far these strains of thought are themselves a 
product of Greek influence upon Palestinian thought, 
it is hard to say. Accounts of inspiration like that 
of IV Ezra xiv.38 ff. and II Baruch xx.5, which 
are ecstatic in character, or of the journey of the soul 
to heaven in Ethiopic Enoch,*> the present writer 
holds with Dieterich 7? must be considered as results 
of contact with Hellenic-Egyptian thought and can- 
not be considered as typically Jewish. ‘The syncretis- 
tic process did not leave Judaism outside its pale, and 
the Enoch literature itself is testimony to the com- 
posite nature of Jewish thought in this era. 

It may be also that these directions of thought 
which we have been noting are also the result of 
Greek influence, although they seem more closely 
assimilated to the thought which we know is indig- 
enous to the soil. And on the whole, we recognize 


** 7. 28-9; xii. 48. 

™ Scott, The Fourth Gospel, p. 216. 

* Enoch, xxxix. 3. 

” Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie, p. 199. 


64 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


that apocalyptic and legalistic Judaism in their char- 
acteristic grooves of thought offer but indirect affilia- 
tions with the concept which is before us for study. 


(3) In Hellenistic Judaism 


It is a more difficult task to appraise the religious 
ideas of Hellenistic Judaism and to estimate their 
influence on the mysticism of the Fourth Gospel. 
Alexandria, the literary center of Hellenistic Judaism, 
had become the vortex of rapidly changing thought 
and expression in the field of both religion and phil- 
osophy. Religious and philosophical systems of widely 
varying types here found themselves in close contact 
with each other, and here yielded themselves to the 
give and take of a genuinely syncretistic age. 

Judaism, released from its geographical isolation, 
and of necessity emancipated from the bonds of nation- 
alistic interest, had shown unprecedented flexibility in 
its adaptation of ideas and practices to the new social 
order. The general environment of tolerance, of eclec- 
ticism in the intellectual life of this cosmopolitan city 
not only brought Jewish religion in rapport with 
Greek thought, but compelled a harmonization of the 
moral earnestness of the former with the speculative 
freedom of the latter. 

Deliberate intent to recommend Judaism to the 
Greek world is seen in such early work of the Alexan- 
drian Jews as the Septuagint and the letter of Aris- 
teas, which relates the miraculous origin of the Sep- 
tuagint as apology for the translation. Less self-con- 
sciously defensive of Judaism, more truly assimilated 
into Greek modes of thought, are the Sybilline Oracles, 
both III and IV Maccabees and the Wisdom of 
Solomon. ‘The latter work stands as one of the finest 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 65 


products of the Hellenistic-Jewish alliance in think- 
ing, and is probably the best example, previous to 
Philo, of the actual transfer of Jewish religious 
thought into the categories of Greek philosophical 
expression. 

Sometimes, however, in this work the two strands 
of thought lie side by side, without being actually 
assimilated to each other. In Chapter xii, a prayer 
of Solomon represents God in the ancient Jewish 
fashion as directly accessible to man, and as hearing 
man’s prayer directly: 


“But thou, being sovereign over thy strength, judgest 
in gentleness, 

And with great forbearance dost thou govern us: 

For the power is thine whensoever thou metest,” 


while Chapters i-xi have represented Him as trans- 
cendent and inaccessible to man, except through the 
agency of wisdom which serves as intermediary be- 
tween God and man. We have previously noted the 
development of the wisdom concept here, as an hypos- 
tatized intermediary necessitated by the increasing 
transcendence in the concept of God. 

But wisdom is not always hypostatized, for 
IV) Maccabees has devoted itself to a philosophical 
discussion of the Divine Reason and its power to 
control the animal nature of man. ‘The author states 
his theme: 


“Our inquiry, then, is whether the Reason is supreme 
master over the passions.” 


Both by his choice of word (Aoytopds) and by his 
definition, the author has distinguished his ‘Reason’ 


4 Pe Le 


66 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


from “the Word” or “Wisdom” as an hypostasis, to 
indicate “the power of reasoning” as against a divine 
emanation. ‘‘Reason” as a guide for life, and “wis- 
dom” as an intermediary between God and man, are 
the emphases of Hellenistic Judaism in general which 
lie closest to our concept. But it is not until the work 
of Philo that they are brought into close relationship 
with the individual’s mystic experience of God. 

“The great antithesis,’ says Miss Julia Wedge- 
wood, “of all human thought is that of Judaism and 
Hellenism. It is hardly possible for us to conceive 
of another moral and intellectual contrast so striking, 
so complete, so exhaustive of all the tendencies that 
belong to human endeavor and interest.” ? But har- 
monization of that great antithesis was attempted and 
was to a degree achieved by Philo, and the result is 
most significant for us, because of the influence of 
Philo’s religious thought on the Fourth Gospel. 

The discussion of the Logos doctrine, as it found 
its way through the intricate maze of Oriental, Jew- 
ish, and Hellenistic thought to the Fourth Gospel has 
been voluminous and thorough.? It is not necessary 
for us to traverse that ground here, but merely to 
remind ourselves of the results of investigation and 
reflection upon it. The problem is recognized as more 
complex than was formerly thought. 

No longer can we dismiss the origin of Philo’s 
Logos doctrine by saying that it was a fusion of the 
Jewish ‘“‘wisdom” concept with Platonic ideas, the 


*Julia Wedgewood, The Moral Ideal, p. 246. 

*This paper assumes without argument the organic unity 
of Prologue and Gospel. 

References need not be cited for the refutation of Har- 
nack’s famous paper Uber das Varhaltniss des Prologs des 
Vierten Evangeliums zum Ganzen Werk, 1892. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 67 


Heraclitean Logos, and the Stoic “powers” of nature 
and reason. ‘These elements there were, and these 
are, no doubt, the ultimate sources, but they them- 
selves had undergone transformation before their 
adoption by Philo, and other sources may be traced. 
Pfleiderer believes that Philo was indebted to Persian 
religion for his idea of the six powers, headed by the 
Logos with its creative power, because of their corre- 
spondence in nature, as mediating beings, emanations, 
and in function, as creative intelligence, power, good- 
ness, etc., with the six Amesha Spentas which sur- 
round the throne of Ahura Mazda.* 

Bousset,®> following Bréhier,® has traced the com- 
plicated history of the term Logos in its relation to 
Hellenistic religion, and while giving full recognition 
to the originality of Philo’s thinking, finds the roots 
of the concept in popular Hellenistic speculation as 
represented by the mystery religions of redemption.’ 
He emerges from his investigation with the conclu- 
sion that Philo’s Logos, though it plays a mediating 
role between God and the world, is, still, less a meta-* 
physical principle than a mythological figure. Reitzen- 
stein’s philological studies have convinced him that the 
Logos concept as it passed to Philo and Christianity 
took its character from Egyptian mythology as repre- 
sented in the Hermetic speculation.® 

Krebs, in the appendix to his Religionsgeschichtliche 


*Pfleiderer, Primitive Christianity, Vol. III, p. 43, Put- 
nams, New York, 1910. 

*Bousset, Kyrios Christos, Gottingen, 1913. 

*Bréhier, Les Idées Philosophiques et Religieuses de 
Philon d’Alexandrie, Paris, 1908. 

*“Bousset, Die Religion des Judentums, p. 519, note 3, 
gives an interesting list of terms borrowed by Philo from the 
language of the Mystery Religions. 

® Reitzenstein, Poimandres. 


68 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


study, “Der Logos als Heiland im Ersten Jahrhun- 
dert,’ has brought correction to bear upon Reitzen- 
stein’s claims for Egyptian-Greek speculation as deter- 
mining in the development of Christian thought, 
especially in the Fourth Gospel, by showing in parallel 
columns that what Reitzenstein finds as sources for 
the Fourth Gospel in Hermetic texts may be paralleled 
in the Old Testament, and presents the opinion that 
the Fourth Gospel is closer to the Old Testament 
than to the Hermetic literature.* 

Dr. Rendel Harris, by a brilliant and scholarly 
examination of the relationship of the Fourth Gos- 
pel to the wisdom writing of the Old Testament, 
arrives at the conclusion that the prologue to the 
Fourth Gospel found its derivation there. Striking 
parallels between the language of Proverbs viii and 
the prologue are adduced, and the ascription of Sapi- 
ential titles to Jesus is cited as proof that the early 
Christian movement accepted its theology from the 
wisdom field of thought.® 


*Krebs’s summary of the examination is as follows: 
“Speculative Begriindung, innere Verkniipfung der Soterio- 
logie mit der Christologie, Darlegung in der Sprache der 
Zeitphilosophie und populdren religiosen Begriffswelt, das 
ist was die Erlisungslehre am Ende des ersten Jahrhunderts 
durch den Logosbegriff gewohnt hat’ (pp. 116-7). 

*Rendel Harris, The Origin of the Prologue to St. John’s 
Gospel, Cambridge, 1917. The book is reviewed by Prof. 
E. F. Scott in the American Journal of Theology, 1918 
(XXII, p. 311), who, giving high praise to the originality 
of the theory and to the value of the relationship between 
Proverbs viii and John i disclosed by the study, still objects 
to the method of analysis on the whole, in that it fails to 
take account of the whole theological situation in the Medi- 
terranean world in the first century A.D. Its dismissal of the 
syncretistic religious and philosophical situation will pre- 
vent widespread acceptance of the theory, even though its 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 69 


An attempt to find the origin of the Hellenistic 
Logos concept in a new quarter has recently been made 
by Stephen Langdon,?° who discovers in Babylonian 
thinking a principle of cosmic reason, which he believes 
is the source of the Hellenistic concept. W. F. 
Albright + of the American School of Oriental Re- 
search in Jerusalem has criticized the theory on both 
linguistic and philosophical grounds, and has shown 
that the Babylonian metaphysic was far too primi- 
tive to be accounted the source of the Hellenistic 
concept. 

These many attempts to place the source of the 
Logos concept in various corners of the globe are con- 
clusive evidence that the concept is a genuine fusing of 
many strands of thought, a blend of elements far more 
scattered in origin than once we dreamed. To the 
present writer, there seems no need for denial of the 
usually accepted view that the direct gateway through 
which the Fourth Gospel received the concept, how- 
ever large we may put the figure which indicates its 
original sources, was the thought of Philo. 

Indeed, the evidence seems too strong to resist. An 
interesting discussion of the influence of Philo on the 
Fourth Gospel appears in Windisch’s “Die Frém- 
migkeit Philos und ihre Bedeutung fiir das Chris- 
tentum.” 12 The discussion shows how in fundamental 
views, in method and in modes of expression, Philo 
and the Fourth Gospel are akin. “Johannes und Philo 
contribution to one phase of the problem is recognized as 
valuable. 

Dr. Westcott presents a similar view to Dr. Harris’s in 
his Gospel According to St. John, Introd., p. xxxii. 

* Journal of the Royal Asiatic Soc., 1918, pp. 433-449. 

* Journal of Bibl. Lit., 1920, Vol. XXXIX, pp. 143 ff. 


“Windisch, Die Frimmigkeit Philos und ihre Bedeutung 
fiir das Christentum, Hinrichs, Leipzig, 1909, pp. 112 ff. 


70 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


haben die gleiche Luft geatmet.’**> “Er ist der Philo 
des Neuen Testamentes’+* is the summary which 
Windisch makes of the relationship—this, of course, 
with the recognition of the wide gulf between them, 
due to the Fourth Gospel’s identification of the Logos 
with the historic Jesus. “Auf eine Paradoxie kommt 
sonach das V erhaltnis des Johannes zur alexandrinischen 
Religionsphilosophie hinaus. Philos Gedankenwelt hat 
dem Evangelisten einen Kanal gegraben, damit er 
in das Griechentum eindringe. Aber der Strom der 
sich in dieses zuvorgegrabene Bett ergoss, zerstorte die 
Spuren des fritheren W asserlaufes.’’ 1° 1% 

There is naturally a considerable interest in the 
question as to how determining the Logos of Philo was 
for the Fourth Gospel. Was the acceptance of the 
Logos doctrine in the mind of the author of the Gospel 
anterior to his acceptance of Christianity, or was the 
concept selected as a convenient vehicle for thought 
already developed? *? 

For the present writer, Dr. Scott’s analysis of the 
relationship seems most satisfying and convincing.*® 
The use of the Logos concept in the prologue only, 
and there without argument or defense, the swift de- 
lineation of its characteristics, the abrupt turn to the 

ORS Ci, PALI i AO ay De XIGsc) 1 LEIA ihe Cae 

*The differences in vocabulary between Philo and the 
Fourth Gospel, which prevent any assumption of literary 
dependence of the latter upon the former, are shown by 
Drummond (based on Siegfried’s Glossarium) in H.D.B., 
Extra Vol., p. 207, but reference should also be made to 
Grill’s study which shows similarities between Philo and 
the Fourth Gospel in both ideas and expression. Grill, 
Untersuchungen itiber die Entstehung des vierten Evan- 
geliums, I, pp. 106 ff, Leipzig, 1902. 

“Cf. Stanton, The Gospels as Historical Documents, p. 
163. 

i Scott, The Fourth Gospel, pp. 148 ff. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 71 


story of Jesus’s life, with portrayal of his activity in 
terms of the Logos function as Life-giver and Light- 
bringer, but without return to the designation by name, 
point in the direction of an acceptance of the Logos 
concept by the evangelist as a well understood doctrine 
which would serve to introduce and commend his 
Gospel to the world. 


“The question whether the Johannine view corre- 
sponds at all points with the Philonic view is in the 
last resort comparatively unimportant. Probably John 
himself ,did not think out his conception with any clear- 
ness or fullness. He availed himself of the Logos idea 
for a practical purpose—to make more intelligible to his 
own mind and the minds of his readers the divine nature 
of Jesus Christ. In accepting it, therefore, he does not 
commit himself to the precise interpretation that Philo 
placed upon it.” ” 


And we must leave it here. It is not for this study 
to go further into the problem of the origin of the 
Logos concept than this recognition that already when 
it reached the hands of Philo, it was a composite figure, 
blended from many strains of thought, Jewish, Ori- 
ental, and Greek, religious, philosophical, mythical, and 
that by way of Philo it came to the Fourth Gospel and 
served there as a means to commend the Gospel to the 
world to which it was directed. But it is for this study 
to try to discover through the use of this concept and 
through other phases of Philo’s religious philosophy, 
the place that reason or “knowledge” played in his 
conception of mystical experience. 


For a writer as voluminous and as varied as Philo, 
it is impossible to achieve with fairness any short sum- 


* Scott, The Fourth Gospel, pp. 148 ff. 


72 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


mary of his view upon even a single factor in religious 
experience. As Inge has said of his theology, 


“We must expect to find the Greek and Hebrew ele- 
ments imperfectly fused. It would surpass the genius of 
any man to harmonize the logical, analytical thought of 
the Greek, with the vague, indefinite intuitions of Hebrew 
prophecy.” ” 


It is quite beyond the scope of this study to attempt 
anything approaching a summary of his system, and it 
is our aim, merely to select for consideration from his 
system of thought such points as bear directly upon the 
concept which we have before us for study. 

Fundamentally, Philo is at homé with Johannine 
ideas, and in fact with all mystical systems, in the re- 
cognition that the heart of religion is the soul’s quest 
for immediate communion with God. Union with 
God is the aim of life, and even the more speculative 
abstractions of Philo’s system, which seem at first sight 
to have cosmological rather than theological interests 
at heart, his reasoning about the infinitude and un- 
knowability of God,?1 the complete transcendence of 
God,?? and his discussion of the ‘‘divine powers” which 
are the forms of God’s thought, tend actually to a more 
religious than a speculative end. ‘The ‘“‘powers” are 
for the assistance of the soul in its quest for God, and 
through them alone is union achieved. 


“But the soul is afraid by itself to rise up to the con- 
templation of the living God, if it does not know the 
road, ... but the man who follows God does of neces- 
sity have for his fellow-travellers all those ‘reasons’ ™ 


(Adyou) which are the attendants of God, which we 


Inge, Art. “Alexandrian Theology,” in E. R. E., I, p. 308. 
“de Mundi Opif, 23. 
” Ibid. * Better, “rational powers.” 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS a3 


are accustomed to call angels, for until a man is made 
perfect, he uses reason as the guide of his path, . 

but when he has arrived at the height of perfect knowl- 
edge, then, running forward vigorously he keeps up with 
the speed of him who was previously leading him in 
his way.” ™ 


Although approached in a quite different fashion, 
this quest of the soul for God is the primary interest 
of the Fourth Gospel. Philo is also at one with the 
mysticism of the Fourth Gospel in his affirmation of 
life as perfection of being, a quality of living which is 
a present possibility rather than a future change in 
nature. In like manner, death is sharply differentiated 
from physical facts and is associated in truth only with 
the denial of perfection: 


“Death is of two kinds: the one being the death of 
the man, the other, the peculiar death of the soul—now 
the death of the man is the separation of his soul from 
his body, but the death of the soul is the destruction of 
virtue and the admission of vice.” ” 


But our problem concerns itself particularly with 
the question as to how that union with God which is 
the goal of life is to be achieved. On God’s side, the 
reaching out for man is through the Logos. As Bent- 
wich has indicated, it is futile to try to formulate any 
one single, definite and consistent notion of Philo’s 
Logos concept: 


“For it is the expression of God in all His multiple 
and manifold activity, the instrument of creation, the 
seat of ideas, the world of thought which God first estab- 
lished as the model of the visible universe, the guiding 


* De Migr. Abr. 31, Cohn and Wendland, II, p. 302. The 
translation is Yonge’s in Bohn’s Classical Library. 
* Leg. Alleg., 1, 33, Cohn and Wendland, I, p. 88. 


74 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


providence, the sower of virtue, the fruit of wisdom, 
described sometimes in religious ecstasy, sometimes in 
philosophical metaphysics, sometimes in the spirit of the 
mystical poet.” ” 


But in this welter of ideas, there emerges steadily 
the belief that the Logos is the active influence of God, 
possessing the soul of man and making it live with 
God.?7, Any achievement in the religious field is 
primarily a gift which is due to God’s grace. 


“For when God determined to establish this (Nobil- 
ity) in us, out of his own unending mercy and love for 
the human race, he could not find any temple upon 
earth more beautiful or more suited for its abode than 


reason.” * 


On man’s side, the soul must free itself from the 


things of sense and give the higher nature, “reason” 
the precedence. 


“But O mind! Take confidence and explain to us 
how you depart and emigrate from the former things, 
you who utter things perceptible only by the intellect to 
those who have been taught to hear rightly, always 
saying, ‘I emigrated from my sojourn in the body when 
I learned to despise the flesh, and I emigrated from the 
outward sense when I learned to look upon the objects 
of outward sense as things which had no existence in 
reality.’ ” ” 


But in spite of this urgent necessity for giving rea- 
son the ascendency over the flesh, Philo advocates no 


* Bentwich, Philo Judeus of Alexandria, Jewish Pub. Soc. 
of Amer., Phila., 1900, p. 148. 

* Teg. Alleg, I 15. 

* De Virtut Nobilitate I, Cohn and Wendland, V, p. 325. 

” Quis Rer. Div. Her. XIV, 1, Cohn and Wendland, III, 


Dp. 17. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 75 


consistent principle of asceticism or withdrawal from 
ordinary life. 


“For in the soul by which the external object of the 
outward senses is honored as the greatest good, perfect 
reason is not found to exist; but in the soul in which 
God walks, the external object of the outward senses is 
not looked upon as the greatest good. And all those who 
through the improvement of their reason are adorned 
in the similitude of the Father in consequence of edu- 
cation, unlearn all subserviency to the irrational impulses 
of the soul.” ® 


It is a question of proportion with him rather than an 
advocacy of the complete suppression of the life of 
sense. But he goes on to make it more explicit: As 
one philosophizes more and more, 


“he brings into one place and connects together the three 
kinds of good things, namely, external things, the things 
of the body and those concerning the soul, things utterly 
different from one another in their whole natures; wish- 
ing to show that each has need of each, . . . and that 
which is really the complete and perfect good, is com- 
posed of all these things together.” ” 


The gift which ultimately comes from God is ap- 
propriated by man through the suppression of sense in 
order that reason may have the preéminence. 

But strangely enough, with all this emphasis upon 
reason as the seat of God’s life in man, Philo actually 
discards it when he comes to the consideration of the 
highest form of union with God. His account of his 
own inspiration for writing is illuminating: 


*® Quod Det. Pot., 11, Cohn and Wendland, I, p. 259. 
* Ibid., p. 260. 


76 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


“My soul is wont to be affected with a divine trance 
and to prophesy about things of which it has no knowl- 
edge.” 33 

“Many a time have I come with the intention of writ- 
ing, and knowing exactly what I ought to set down, but 
I have found my mind barren and fruitless, and I have 
gone away with nothing done. But at times I have come 
empty and suddenly have been full, for ideas were invis- 
ibly rained down upon me from above, so that I was 
seized by a Divine frenzy, and was lost to everything, 
place, people, self, speech, and thought. I had gotten a 
stream of interpretation, a gift of light, a clear survey 
of things, the clearest that eye can give.” ® 


And he is even more explicit about the necessity for 
the suspension of the action of the reason if man is to 
achieve complete union with God: 


“He was also of necessity invested with the gift of 
prophecy, in order that he might through the providence 
of God learn all those things which he was unable to 
comprehend by his reason (Aoyioud ) -for what the mind 
(vowvcs) is unable to attain to, that prophecy masters.” ™ 


In another instance he explains more fully the pro- 
cesses of mystical experience. Four types of ecstatic ex- 
perience are listed, of which the fourth is typical for 
prophetic natures. Using Genesis xv. 12, “about the 
setting of the sun, a trance fell upon him,” as a point 
of departure, Philo allegorizes to show how the human 
reason must give place to divine inspiration if one is 
to attain the highest type of ecstasy: 


“And under the symbol of the sun, he intimates our 
mind (vovc): for what reasoning is in us, that the sun 


® De Cherubim, IX, Cohn and Wendland, I, p. 176. 

* De. Migr. Abr., Bentwich’s translation, of. cit., pp. 59- 
60, Cohn and Wendland, II, p. 275. 

* De Vita Mosis, U1, 6, Cohn and Wendland, IV, p. 201. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS i af 


is, in the world. Since each of them gives light, the one 
casting a light which is perceptible by the outward sense, 
to shine upon the universe, and the other shedding beams 
discernible only by the intellect by means of our appre- 
hensions, upon ourselves. As long, therefore, as our 
mind still shines around, pouring as it were a noontide 
light into the whole soul, we being masters of ourselves, 
are not possessed by any extraneous influence; but when 
it approaches its setting, then as is natural, a trance 
which proceeds from inspiration takes violent hold of 
us, and madness seizes upon us, for when the divine 
light shines, and the human light sets, then this other 
rises and shines, and this very frequently happens to the 
race of prophets; for the mind that is in us is removed 
from its place at the arrival of the divine spirit, but 
is again restored to its previous habitation when that 
spirit departs.” ” 


_ For this expression of the realization of the soul’s 
quest for God, Philo, with all his grounding in the 
theology of Judaism, with all his true sympathy with 
the legalistic basis of Mosaic piety, still has turned to 
Hellenistic categories of thought. "The quest of the 
soul for God is realized through a genuinely ecstatic 
mystical experience. “Philo ist der erste Mystiker und 
Ekstatiker auf dem Boden spezifisch monotheistische 
Froémmingkeit.” *® And in one instance at least he has 
accepted the language of the mystery-religions for the 
expression of this ecstatic experience: 


“Thus also, Moses having fixed his tent outside of the 
Tabernacle, and outside of all the corporeal army, that 
is to say, having established his mind so that it should 
not move, begins to worship God, and having entered 


*° Quis Rerum Div. Her., Cohn and Wendland, III, p. 60. 

*Bousset, Die Religion des Judentums, p. 520. For the 
analysis of Philo’s views and a discussion of their Jewish 
and Hellenistic sources cf. ibid., p. 512 ff. 


78 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


into the darkness, that invisible country, remains there 
performing the most sacred mysteries, and becomes not 
merely an initiated man, but also an hierophant of mys- 
teries, and a teacher of divine things.” 


In the last analysis, Philo has dismissed the reason of 
man as the gateway to union with God. Up to a 
certain point it serves, but the actual experience of 
mystical union with God takes place because reason 
has been suppressed and ecstatic illumination has taken 
its place. 

Our hypothesis that the Fourth Gospel has accepted 
the Philonic Logos doctrine in its main outlines, with 
characteristic modifications to suit the purpose of 
John’s own religious thought, and with no commit- 
ment of himself to the precise details carried with it in 
Philo’s formulation, leaves us with this question: 
Does this suppression of the rational faculty in the 
soul’s realization of God become one of the accepted 
or one of the rejected bits for the Fourth Gospel? Its 
connections with the Logos doctrine are close, and we 
could bring our question to a focus here, were it not 
that this Hellenistic world gave other systems with 
which our author came into direct contact. We must 
leave our question open for the examination of the 
other formulations which were available to him. 


(4) In the Mysteries 


In no field of New Testament study are the prob- 
lems more challenging than in the search to deter- 
mine the relationship existing between the early Chris- 
tian movement and the mystery cults which were 
current in the Mediterranean world contemporane- 
ously with the early development of Christianity. 


* De Gigantibus, XII, Cohn and Wendland, II, p. 52. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 79 


That Christianity did receive an impress from the 
redemption religions, traceable in both its practices 
and its thought, most scholars are now ready to grant 
as historically attested. When that influence began to 
show itself, how extensive it was, and how intensely 
it functioned, are still moot points. 

Especially keen has been the interest in the question 
of Paul’s debt to the mystery cults, and Dr. Scott’s 
article has brought before us the question of how 
deeply the Fourth Gospel finds the roots of its mysti- 
cism in that quarter. 

Among the works which have argued for an inti- 
mate relationship between Christianity and the mys- 
tery religions, have been Loisy’s “Les Mysteéres paiéns 
et le Mystére Chrétien,” Reitzenstein’s ‘Die Hel- 
lenistischen Mysterienreligionen,” Dieterich’s “Eine 
Mithrasliturgie,’ and Bousset’s ‘“‘Kyrios Christos”; 
while another group of works represented by Ken- 
nedy’s “St. Paul and the Mystery Religions,” and 
Clemen’s “Primitive Christianity and Its Non-Jewish 
Sources,” have argued that the mystery religions, 
though not a negligible factor in Christianity’s heri- 
tage of thought, were far outweighed by the truly 
determining influence of Jewish thought. 

The problem is a large one, and because of our all 
too meager materials from the cults, a difficult one, 
which will require patient and persistent effort if a 
real solution is to be achieved. 

Our task is the examination of such materials as we 
have from these ancient cults that will throw light 
upon their notions of “knowledge” as it functioned in 
religious experience. But a word first as to the nature 
of these religions in general. Farnell defines the term 
UVoTHOLOV in its strict sense, as a secret worship, the 
idea of secrecy lying at the root of the word, a secret 


80 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


“to which only certain privileged people, of pun dévtes; 
were admitted, a ritual of purification or other pre- 
liminary probation being required before pmotc, 
and the mystic ceremony itself being so important and 
perilous that a hierophant was needed to guide the 
catechumen aright.” + 

But a second characteristic was equally important in 
the cults as they flourished in the Mediterranean 
world at the beginning of the Christian era—the 
notion of salvation or redemption for the individual 
through the aid of a savior god. “These two char- 
acteristics were closely united in this, that the object 
of the pimots was to place the worshiper in an 
immediate relationship with the deity, an act which 
itself constituted the redemptive process, the achieve- 
ment of an emotional exaltation at the moment, and 
the assurance of a happy immortality after death. 

In all the cults with which we have to deal, a myth, 
usually arising from a more primitive agrarian or 
chthonic myth, and usually dealing in some fashion 
with the experiences of a dying and reviving savior 
god, was the basis of the cult, and the rites were the 
reénactment of the myth, with the initiates partici- 
pating in the mystical drama. 

In distinction from the ancient national religions of 
the Eastern world, the mystery cults bore an individual 
rather than a social stamp. If, like the Eleusinian 
mysteries, a cult arose under local auspices and with 
oficial connections uniting it with the community 
organization, even then there was a sharp contrast be- 
tween its individual emphasis in its dealings with its 
clientele and the ancient notion of salvation in the 
ethnic faiths. 

Instead of membership taken as a matter of course, 


*Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, Ill, p. 130. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 81 


because of the accident of birth, affiliation with the 
mystery cult was a matter of conscious choice on the 
part of the individual, and was a result of complying 
with the regulations and meeting the ritual require- 
ments which the individual cult prescribed. In place 
of the public festival of the national religion, whose 
object was the securing of the protection and favor of 
the deity for the community welfare, the mystery cult 
substituted sacramental rites for the candidates, care- 
fully guarded from the public, and leading to a special 
ceremony for the initiates, at which the secret was im- 
parted which was itself the guarantee of individual 
salvation.? 

Such, in outline, were the distinguishing marks of 
these popular faiths which were gaining such headway 
in the Roman Empire at the time of Christianity’s 
early life. Differences in origin and in environment 
brought differences in practice, ethic, and belief, result- 
ing in the following cults: the Eleusinian mysteries, 
with their purification rites, their sacred meal, their 
little passion-play, which gave participation in the 
emotions of Demeter searching for her daughter; the 
Dionysus cult, with its crude, orgiastic flesh-eating 
ceremonies; the Orphic mysteries, the more controlled, 
sophisticated counterpart of the Dionysus cult, with its 
cosmological interests and its reaching out after phi- 
losophy; the Phrygian Cybele-Attis cult with its mys- 
tery-play and its barbarous rites of self-mutilation, and 
its performance of the “‘taurobolium;” ? the Isis-Osiris 


* Loisy, of. cit., Ch. 1. 

*Late in origin, according to Cumont (Oriental Religions 
in Roman Paganism), but even so, practices of this nature 
were not foreign to this age. Hepding (A4itis., p. 199 ff.) 
distinguishes between a primitive taurobolium which was 
sacrificial in nature and the later one which was the rite of 


82 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


mysteries from Egypt, with a pantomimic liturgy repre- 
senting the death and resuscitation of Osiris, and with 
its genuinely devotional strain of thought; the Mithra 
from Persia, steadily gaining in prestige, with its 
savior-god with whom the aspirant became united after 
seven stages of initiatory rites. 

All these were offering religious satisfaction to the 
Hellenistic world in terms of individual salvation from 
the trials of this present order of life—a rebirth to 
immortal life. 

We shall not treat of subsidiary factors in these 
cults, of the accretions of occultism, astrology, magic, 
their sacerdotal development, their curious eschato- 
logical theories, their angelology and demonology, and 
their various attitudes toward ascetic or sensual prac- 
tices. Our concern is with the gnosis which was the 
gift of the deity to the participant in the cult. 

In some cases the secret knowledge imparted by the 
ceremonies seems to have been of a very simple char- 
acter, merely knowledge of the nature of the rites 
themselves or of the details of the myth, not shared 
with the public at large. Belief in the efficacy of this 
possession of the knowledge of the rites is revealed in 
the closing lines of the ““Homeric hymn to Demeter” 
which related the Demeter-Kore myth. Demeter at 
the close of her search, told the story to certain chosen 
friends, and, 


“she showed them the manner of her rites and taught 
them her goodly mysteries, holy mysteries which none 
may violate or search into, or noise abroad, for the 
great curse from the Gods restrains the voice. Happy 
is he among deathly men who hath beheld these things! 


individual initiation into the cult. No clear evidence for 
the latter appears before the early fourth century. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 83 


And he that is uninitiate, and hath no lot in them, hath 
never equal lot in death beneath the murky gloom.” ‘ 


This is, in general, the type of knowledge repre- 
sented by the Orphic mysteries, whose cosmological 
theories led to the belief that man contained within 
him a spark of the divine nature, which was capable 
of being extricated from its contaminating participa- 
tion in matter, by a succession of rebirths. But the 
process of reincarnation could be facilitated and expe- 
dited by participation in the mysteries, knowledge of 
whose rites constituted the gnosis which was the sum- 
mum bonum of existence.® 

But the oldest form of securing knowledge of deity, 
or union with deity, is, as Dieterich has pointed out, 
through eating; and in modified, more refined forms, 
it has been a persistent factor in the practices of reli- 
gion.® In the mystery cults it appears in its crudest 
form in the Dionysus rites, of eating the raw flesh and 
drinking the blood of the sacred animal, which was 
held to be the incarnation of the god himself.” By this 
process, the participant became himself Zy@eo¢ “full of 
the god,” inspired or possessed. 

How far removed this is from any rational processes 
or appreciative judgments, may be judged by the orgi- 
astic context into which the rite was set, though sug- 
gestions of more sober thoughts associated with the 
rites appear in Euripides in a chorus from “the 
Bacche”’: 


“Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Lang: Homeric Hymns, p. 
209. 

°F. Legge, Forerunners and Rivals of Early Christianity. 
Ch. IV. 

° Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie, p. rot. 

™For a description of the rite cf. Loisy, of. cit., p. 29. 


84 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


“Let reverence keep silent all lips 
For the song, which is ever his due to great Dionysus 
I sing, 
Blessed he, who knowing well 
How to lead a holy life, 
Gives due honor to the gods, 
Joins him to the sacred land 
Of the Bacchants in the hills 
Cleansed by these holy rites.’’* 


Miss Harrison’s comment upon this experience is 
acute; the basis of her summary lies in the psychology 
of primitive religion. She says: 


“We are now at last in a position to say what was 
the characteristic essence of the worship of Dionysus. 
The fact, however repugnant, must be fairly faced. This 
essence was intoxication. But by the very nature of prim- 
itive thought, this essence was almost instantly trans- 
formed into something deeper and higher than mere phys- 
ical intoxication. It was intoxication thought of as pos- 
session. ‘The savage tastes of some intoxicant for the 
first time; a great delight takes him, he feels literally 
a new strange life within him. How has it come about? 
The answer to him is simple. He is possessed by a god, 
évbcos, not figuratively but literally and actually; there 
is a divine thing within him that is more than himself. 
He is mad, but with a divine madness.” ° 


In Mithraism a highly complicated ritual served to 
typify the ascent of the soul to heaven.t° More highly 
developed and refined notions of communion with deity 
are revealed in the liturgy, where the sacred meal ™ 

*Lines 70-75. 

*Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 


iy 426. . . . . 
® Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie. 
™ Cumont, Textes Relatifs aux Mystéres de Mithra, p. 320. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 85 


played an important part in the ceremonies of initia- 
tion. Justin’s famous comparison between the Chris- 
tian Eucharist and these rites of Mithra is testimony 
to the close analogies between them. At the close of 
his description of the Christian Eucharist, Justin says: 


“Which the wicked devils have imitated in the mys- 
teries of Mithras, commanding the same thing to be 
done. For that bread and a cup of water are placed 
with certain incantations in the mystic rites of one who 
is being initiated, you either know or can know.”” 


Of the results of this sacramental meal, Cumont says: 


“On attendait de ce banquet mystique, surtout de 
labsorption du vin sacré, des effets surnaturels: la liqueur 
enivrante ne donnait pas seulement la vigueur du corps et 
la prospérité matérielle, mais la sagesse de l’esprit; elle 
communiquait au néophyte la force de combattre les 
esprits malfaisants, bien plus, elle lui conférait comme 
a son dieu, une immortalité glorieuse.” ” 


Of the nature of the “sagesse de l’esprit’’ we should 
like to know more. The remains from the Mithra 
cult give us little information of the actual content of 
the gnosis given, other than to assert the esoteric char- 
acter of its gifts. The best that the monuments can 
give us reveals that the knowledge was ritualistic in 
character—not a set of doctrines, or theories, but an 
assemblage of rites,1* and these practices derived from 
ancient popular religion in Persia with accretions from 
the astrology of Babylonia, and finally a clothing in the 
outward garments of Greek ritual religion.’® 


“Justin, Apol., I: 66. 
*Cumont, of. cit., p. 321. 

* Cumont, of. cif., p. 321. 

* Loisy, op. cit., pp. 166-167. 


86 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


The publication in 191'5 by Grenfell and Hunt in 
their “Oxyrhynchus Papyri” of a newly discovered In- 
vocation, of Isis has given us new light upon the wide- 
spread acceptance of the cult, and gives us one phrase 
indicative of the nature of the secret knowledge which 
the ritual gave. As the introduction to the text states, 
the composition of the invocation must have taken 
place not later than the first century A.D., since the 
papyrus itself dates from near the beginning of the 
second century. ‘The long list of places, both in Egypt 
and outside, at which Isis is honored gives us pause in 
the realization of the spread of the cult at this time. 

In the second part of the invocation, which is a 
hymn of praise to the goddess, the various aspects of 
her divinity are extolled. One phrase, doubtless re- 
ferring to the dreams and visions of the type which 
Lucius had in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius is note- 
worthy: “Thou art seen by those who invoke thee 
faithfully.” 1° : 

This is the highest degree of gnosis that the mys- 
tery religion knows, the sight of the deity itself, and 
the cults had a special term to apply to experiences 
of that sort—‘‘epoptism,” which meant the culmina- 
tion of all initiatory rites in the vision of the god him- 
self. In this invocation no hints are given of the 
devices by which man secures the vision, but the vision 
in Apuleius supplies that lack. 

The place which the goddess filled in the everyday 
life of her followers is shown in the Nysa (Arabia) 
inscription given by Diodorus in his History?" 
(c.27 B.c.), but more fully in the Ios inscription, 


** Grenfell and Hunt, Oxyrhynchus Papyri XI., par. 1380, 
D: 202, 1, 152. 

“TY, 27; quoted by Deissmann, Light from the Ancient 
East, p. 134. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 87 


which is longer but similar in thought. In this inscrip- 
tion, the goddess is hailed, not only as the author of 
all the institutions of civilization, but as the founder 
of the laws of the natural world, and designer of 
human qualities. She it is “who gave and ordained 
laws unto men, which not one is able to change,” 1° 
and she it was who “‘showed mysteries unto men.” 

Plutarch’s interpretation of the Isis-Osiris religion 
also gives this philosophical evaluation of the popular 
faith. He identifies Osiris with the principle of reason 
in the universe and designates Isis as the female prin- 
ciple of nature whose essential characteristic is produc- 
tivity. Isis is responsible for all fruitful processes in 
Nature, while Osiris was the creator of the rational 
world.?® 

These commentaries on the popular religion show 
the tendency toward rationalization, at least in some 
minds, but how general the practice of thought in rela- 
tion to the cults was, we have no way to know. 

For our purpose, the best source at our command 
for the understanding of the cultic ceremonies of the 
Isis-Osiris religion is the record of the initiation of 
Lucius into the cult, which appears in the eleventh 
book of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius. Although its 
date is subsequent to the period which we have under 
discussion, it does not differ materially from the records 
of earlier times, and it has this advantage for our pur- 
pose, that it is a fuller exposition than we have in any 
other one document, and that it actually interprets 
from the point of view of an adherent of the cult, the 
mystical experiences of the initiatory rites. 

We are shown how the initiate must wait for the 
goddess to make known through her priest her willing- 


* Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East, p. 137. 
* Plutarch, de Iside et Osiride, 53 ff. 


88 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


ness to receive him. We hear of his preliminary rites 
of purification by bathing, of baptism and of prayer; 
of his ten days of abstinence and then of the actual 
initiation; and finally of two later stages of initiation 
which lead to the installation of the candidate as priest. 
The point of highest interest in the narrative is the 
beautiful prayer of Lucius at the close of his first initia- 
tory rites—a prayer expressing the genuine religious 
emotion called forth by the ceremonies. The goddess 
is recognized as the giver of all gifts, the controller of 
man’s life, and of the universe. But the heart of 
it is the expression of the soul’s sense of oneness 
with her: 


“My voice hath no power to utter that which i think 
of thy majesty; no, not if I had a thousand mouths and 
sO many tongues, and were able to continue forever. 
Howbeit as a good religious person, and according to 
my poor estate, I will do what I may. I will always 
keep thy divine appearance in remembrance, and close 
the imagination of thy most holy godhead within my 
breast.” 


This is a far cry from the god-intoxication of the 
Dionysiac orgies. Here is the sensitive appreciation of 
a genuinely religious soul, mystical in the nature of its 
ecstasy. The vision has transported him beyond the 
limits of ordinary experience, and he believes that it 
will never pass from him. Some hints of the nature of 
this mystical experience appear in the narrative. It 
came as a gift by the grace of heaven, not as a result 
of noble birth, or by dint of achievement on the part 
of Lucius. He fulfilled certain conditions but the 
vision was not earned: 


” Apuleius Metamorphoses, XI, 25; Adlington trans., Loeb 
Classical Library, p. 585. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 89 


“Neither did thy noble lineage, thy dignity, neither 
thy excellent doctrine anything avail thee.” ™ 


The prerequisite acts, however, upon which the vision 
was resultant are enumerated, daily service in the tem- 
ple, chastity, abstinence from meats.?* Then when the 
vision came, its secrets must not be told. Secret books 
had been studied and a secret charge had been given by 
the priests.22 At the ceremony of dedication itself, 
secret things happened which it is not lawful for the 
initiate to tell: *+ 


“Verily I would tell thee if it were lawful for me 
to tell; then wouldst thou know if it were convenient 
for thee to hear; but both thy ears and my tongue should 
incur the pain of rash curiosity.” ” 


The vision is, like all truly mystical experience, in- 
effable. 

Here is the mystery cult at its best, a record of the 
individual’s sense of participation in the divine life 
through genuinely mystical religious experience. As 
Kennedy has said, ‘‘the description of Apuleius implies 
something more than mere ecstatic vision, though of 
course a condition of ecstasy is implied in the ascent of 
the soul through the elements.” 2° Some reflective 
steps are necessarily present in the solemn preparation 
for the initiation. ‘The interpretation of the secret 
books by the priest implies a touch at least of prepara- 
tion in the intellectual field. And the conception of 


“XI, 15, Loeb, p. 563. 

™ XI, 20, 21, 22, 23; Loeb, pp. 573-579. 

*% XI, 23; Loeb, p. 579. 

MAI, a8, pe) SS. 

* XI, 25, p. 583-4. 

Kennedy, St. Paul and the Mystery Religions, p. 102, 
note 2. 


gO KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


regeneration resultant upon the vision makes its appeal 
to the rational side of man’s nature. 

But as we take the vision as a whole, it can hardly 
be denied that emotional elements predominate. It 
came by illumination; it gave emotional exaltation; it 
promised eternal life with the deity who had granted 
the vision.?? 

In all the gamut of human experience represented by 
the mystery cults, from the simple rites which them- 
selves constitute the gnosis, from the crude rites where 
the eating of flesh constituted the process of becoming 
one with the god, to the higher stages in which a vision 
experience makes the aspirant aware of deity, the mys- 
tery cult stands for something to be known in religion. 
In the space of time between the primitive Dionysiac 
rites and the vision of Apuleius, a spiritualizing tend- 
ency has been at work, a refining influence which 
gives a different color to the process which gives the 
secret. 

But in the whole scale of that development, knowl- 
edge, and not faith, was the summum bonum. Whether 
the content of the knowledge was a set of rites, 
whether it took on a speculative character as with 
Orphism, or whether it was a vision of deity itself, the 
mystery religion held it as a gift from heaven, to be 
appropriated by man, not through the rational or intel- 
lectual processes, but through the gateway of emotional 
states. 

Myth, rites, sacraments, and visions all appealed pri- 
marily to the emotional nature of man. ‘The experi- 
ence through which he passed was prepared for by 
ascetic or by orgiastic practices, not by reflective proc- 
esses, and the result which the experience gave was 
not a rational conviction but an emotional exaltation. 


* Cumont, After-Life in Roman Paganism, pp. 121 ff. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS gli 


(5) In Gnosticism 


The “knowledge” concept lies at the very heart of 
the great religio-speculative movement known as Gnos- 
ticism, since yv@oug or divine enlightenment is the 
means by which the soul of man is liberated from 
imprisonment in evil matter, and gains entrance into 
the higher world of light. Irenzus in characterizing 
Gnosticism says of Simon: 


“He gives, too, as he affirms, by means of that magic 
which he teaches, knowledge to this effect, that one may 
overcome those very angels that made the world.” * 


The study of this concept in the Gnostic sects and 
its possible relation to the concept in the Fourth Gos- 
pel is beset with difficulty due to the lack of uniformity 
in the beliefs and practices covered by the term Gnosti- 
cism, to the fact that our sources are all too fragmen- 
tary and are so largely the views of opponents rather 
than adherents of the sects, and to the fact that the 
sects are a product of a long process of syncretism, of 
whose origins we know far too little. Its characteriza- 
tion as “the boldest and grandest syncretism the world 
had ever seen” is not beside the mark.? 

Harnack’s designation of Gnosticism as “the acute 
hellenization of Christianity” * has been shown to be 
inadequate unless it be expanded to allow for a pre- 
Christian development of Gnosticism, which in fusing 
with Christianity produced the result which he de- 
scribes. Whether Gnosticism was ultimately of Baby- 
lonian origin, as Anz * would have us believe, or Per- 


*Treneus, Against Heresies, 1, 23:5. 

* Kurtz, Church History, Phila., 1867, I, p. 96. 
*Harnack, History of Dogma, I, p. 226. 
*Anz, Ursprung des Gnostizismus. 


92 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


sian, as Bousset maintains,® or of Egyptian, as Reitzen- 
stein holds,® it gathered to itself in its process of devel- 
opment ideas which were at home in all these lands, 
and, before its fusion with Christianity, offered a sys- 
tem of Oriental speculation which was characteristic 
of the redemption religion type. 

Fundamentally akin to the mystery religions? in its 
notions of salvation, and in its provision of an esoteric 
knowledge as the means for securing that salvation, it 
will not need detailed consideration in our study except 


to note such departures from the mystery religion 


concepts as are most significant for us, and to indicate 
its special relation to the Fourth Gospel. 
The kinship of Gnosticism with the mystery reli- 


gions lay in its fundamental interest in the journey of 


the soul heavenward, in its aristocratic ideas of salva- 
tion, in its dualism between the world of matter and 
of spirit (expressed in the Persian fashion by the cate- 
gories of light and darkness), in the provision of 
deliverance from the present order by means of a 
redemption brought by a messenger from the world of 
light, and appropriated by man through the per- 
formance of magical formulz, sacraments, or rites of 
initiation. It differentiated itself from the mystery 
religions by its more rigorously comprehensive pessi- 
mism over the world of matter. 

Whereas the mystery religions had appropriated Ori- 


ental astrology and had deified the astral bodies, Gnos- | 


ticism found even the astral world evil, and by a 


*Bousset, Die Hauptprobleme der Gnosis. 

*Reitzenstein, Poimandres. 

“For likenesses between Gnosticism and the Mystery Re- 
ligions, cf. Wendland, Die hellenistisch-rimische Kultur in 
thren Beziehungen zu Judentum und Christentum, p. 168. 

*Pfleiderer, Primitive Christianity, III, Ch. XV. 


i 5 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 93 


process of demonization ® had made them a part of the 
world of darkness from which man was. to escape, 
outposts of the kingdom of evil by which man could 
pass only with the password which marked him the 
possessor of the esoteric gnosis. Gnosticism also dif- 
ferentiated itself from the mystery religions on its 
speculative side. 

The mystery religions had assumed a dying and 
reviving savior-god with whom the initiate was to be 
identified by the rites of the cult. Gnosticism—while 
we can affirm no uniform doctrines for all the sects, 
and must allow for widely diverse views—as a rule 
assumed a supreme god who was less a personal being 
than an abstraction, and so remote as to be unknow- 
able.t° From this supreme god emanated pairs of 
beings, divine existences of a more mystical than mythi- 
cal nature, one of whose number, usually Sophia, had 
fallen to earth. The redemptive process consisted of 
two parts: the restoration of Sophia to her place in the 
Pleroma, and the rescue of all other seeds of light in 
the world of darkness, and was performed by a savior- 
god who in early Gnosticism was neither an historical 
nor a mythical figure, but an abstraction, Light, Truth, 
or “Nous.” 

The identification in Christian Gnosticism of the 
savior with Christ,4 brought Gnosticism into even 
closer similarity to Hellenistic theology of the redemp- 
tion religion type, in that this abstraction was then 
identified with a personality—Christ, while Gnosticism 
lacked those soberer features of orthodox Christianity, 


*Bousset finds this one of the evidences for the Persian 
origin of Gnosticism. Op. cit., pp. 277 ff.; pp. 39 ff. 

Norden, Agnostos Theos, p. 228. 

“Cf. Bevan, Hellenism and Christianity; Essay, “The 
Gnostic Redeemer.” 


94 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


which constituted the cleft in thinking between it and 
the mystery religions. 

Gnosticism, to be sure, made its reservations, like 
the Docetic view, for example, or the view of the 
Pistis Sophia that Jesus was really distinct from the 
heavenly Christ, two persons—reservations, which 
were to preserve the dualism of matter and spirit and 
to prevent the actual identification of the savior with 
a person who belonged to the realm of matter. But 
Christian Gnosticism meant a step in the direction of 
closer affiliation with the theology of the redemption 
religions. 

In the consideration of the actual content of the 
gnosis concept in Gnosticism, we are on much the same 
ground as in the mystery religions. It was knowledge 
of the rites, the forms, the passwords which enabled 
the soul to make its journey safely to the heavenly 
realm. Redemption came actually as a result of divine 
activity, a gift from the heavenly realm, mediated by 
a soteriological agent, but man appropriated that 
saving activity through his “knowledge” of how 
the upward journey was to be accomplished. It 
was the secrets of this journey which constituted the 
“knowledge.” 1? 

In the Naasene hymn, quoted by Hippolytus,?* 
which represents a primitive strain of Gnostic 
thought,?* it is the “secrets of the saintly path” which 
the deliverer brings. The “Hymn of the Robe of 
Glory” must be as late as the second half of the second 


“Cf. Reitzenstein’s note “Yy@ot¢ und nyetwa,” Hellen- 
istiche Mysterien Religionen, 2nd Edition, 1920, pp. 
135 ff. 

* Hippolytus, Refutation of all Heresies, V. 6. 

“Reitzenstein’s analysis in his Poimandres detects an 
early pagan fragment upon which the Christian hymn is 
built. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 95 


century,!® but is still indicative of the trend which 
Gnostic thought must have been taking at the time of 
the writing of the Fourth Gospel. Here the Robe in 
which the soul was wrapped, which enabled it to make 
its heavenward journey, was “stirring with the motions 
of gnosis.” 7° The identification of the savior with 
“Truth,” “Life,” and “Light,” in the Marcosian invo- 
cations ‘* and in the Pistis Sophia,'® indicate that the 
soteriological process was one of illumination—light- 
sharing—and the invocations reveal that the nature of 
the knowledge given was esoteric and magical. It is 
“the name which is hidden” which is to help in the 
redemptive process. The progression from “mystery” 
to “mystery” in the Pistis Sophia represents the devel- 
opment of this thought of the function of an esoteric 
gnosis as redemptive. One secret leads to another and 
finally the master-mystery is the key to salvation: 


“Mary Magdalene started forward and said: ‘My 
Lord, bear with me and be not wroth with me if I 
question on all things with precision and certainty. Now 
therefore, my Lord, is then another the word of the 
mystery of the Ineffable and another the word of the 
whole gnosis?’ 

“The Saviour answered and said: ‘Yea, another is the 
mystery of the Ineffable and another is the word of the 
whole gnosis.’ 

“And Mary answered again and said unto the Saviour: 
‘My Lord, bear with me if I question thee and be not 
wroth with me. Now therefore, my Lord, unless we 
live and know the gnosis of the whole word of the 


“Mead, Fragments of Faith Forgotten, p. 392. 

* Mead, op. cit., p. 413. 

* Quoted in Irenzus’ Refutation, I, 21. 

* The Pistis Sophia probably dates from the third century, 
but reflects earlier ideas. Pistis Sophia, II, 192; I, 110; I, 60, 
etc. 


96 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


Ineffable, shall we not be able to inherit the Light- 
kingdom?’ 

“And the Saviour answered and said unto Mary: 
‘Surely; for every one who shall receive a mystery of 
the Light-kingdom, will go and will inherit up to the 
region up to which he hath received mysteries. But he 
will not know the gnosis of the universe, wherefore all 
this hath arisen, unless he knoweth the one and only 
word of the Ineffable which is the gnosis of the uni- 
verse. And again in openness, I am the Gnosis of the 
universe. And moreover it is impossible to know the 
one and only word of the gnosis unless a man first 
receive the mystery of the Ineffable. But all the men 
who shall receive mysteries in the Light—every one will 
go and inherit up to the region up to which he hath 
received mysteries.’ ” ” 


The quotation has been given in full in order to 
show the lengths to which the system was finally car- 
ried. ‘The progression from secret to secret puts the 
whole burden of salvation upon the possession of the 
gnosis. All the apparatus of the soteriological process 
has been concentrated in the quite magical effect of the 
possession of esoteric knowledge. In this extreme 
form, it is neither ecstasy nor reflection that is wanted. 
It has become too external and too mechanical to 
demand either religious fervor or a process of logical 
thought. It is magical in its effects. 

In this bizarre mixture of myth, speculation, and 
magic brought together from various localities and 
from varying systems of thought, under the head of 
Gnosticism, orthodox Christianity found an actual 
rival. Not until the end of the second century did 
the controversy between orthodox Christianity and 
Gnosticism reach its height, but many of the New 
Testament writings show that by the end of the first 

* Pistis Sophia, Il, 96. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 97 


century and the beginning of the second, the battle 
has been called,?° and that the Christian movement 
is already conscious that there is necessity for defin- 
ing its position in relation to Gnosticism. That the 
Fourth Gospel came into being under the conscious- 
ness of that rivalry is clear from many points of view. 

Of early theories concerning Gnostic authorship of 
the Gospel or of controversial motives as the primary 
urge to the writing, we need not speak here,?1 but 
it is significant for our purpose to note the conscious 
opposition of the Fourth Gospel to Gnostic theories 
of “knowledge,” even though we must hold it as a 
secondary, and perhaps an incidental factor in the 
aim of the Gospel as a whole. 

We emerge here into the realm of controversial 
interest, aware of itself, and deliberate. The general 
tone of opposition to Gnosticism in the Fourth Gos- 
pel has been pointed out by Dr. Scott,?? in its steady 
affirmation of the reality of the earthly life of Jesus, 
and especially of his passion experience, the absence 
of any hierarchy of divine emanations, the complete 
and full acceptance of the Old Testament and the 
God of the Old Testament, and quite significantly in 
the avoidance of the characteristic Gnostic vocabulary 
yv@ots, miotts and cogia. This points to a quite 
definite polemic on the part of the author against 
Gnosticism, in spite of his acceptance of certain Gnos- 
tic characteristics of thought. He has accepted the 
categories of Life and Light as designations for the 


Rev. ii. 24; Col. ii. 3, 9; I John i. 2, 3, 6; ii. 223 iv. 3; 
wiS: 
*1Treneus III, 2; Epiphanius LI, 3. Cf. A. S. Peake, Art. 
“Cerinthus,” in E. R. E., Ill, p. 318, and the literature 
there cited. 

Scott, The Fourth Gospel, pp. 91 ff. 


98 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


Savior; the dualism of light and darkness, and the 
fundamental basis of religious thought which over- 
leaps the barriers of the world of sense and deals 
directly with the world of supra-sensible realities. 
Loisy in his new edition of his commentary on the 
Fourth Gospel says that the author of the Gospel is, 


“un maitre de la gnose plutét qu’un apotre de la foi.” * 


But the relation of the Fourth Gospel to Gnos- 
ticism is important for us as it touches the concept 
“knowledge,” and this question we must discuss later, 
as we return to the Fourth Gospel, as to how it has 
made use of, or consciously discarded theories with 
which it came in contact. The result of this study 
of the “knowledge” concept in Gnosticism may be 
summed up in the affirmation of its common content 
with that of the mystery religions. 

In spite of the stupendous overlay of speculation 
around such problems as the origin of the world, the 
source of evil, and the goal of cosmic processes, Gnos- 
ticism, particularly in its earlier forms, had as its 
fundamental interests those of the mystery religions, 
and its concept of the function of “knowledge” came to 
it by the way of the Oriental mystery rather than by the 
way of Hellenic philosophy. As Dr. Scott has stated it: 


“Theories concerning the nature and destiny of the 
soul were interwoven with the ancient traditions. But 
while Gnosticism availed itself freely of the language 
and ideas of philosophy, the appearance which it thus 
assumed was for the most part deceptive. It was not 
a speculative, but a mythological system. . . . Its specu- 
lative systems were the interpretation of the praxis.” ™ 

* Alfred Loisy, Le Quatriéme Evangile (2nd edition), 
1921, p. 66. 

*E. F. Scott, Art. “Gnosticism,” in E. R. E., VI, pp. 234-5. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 99 


The primary interest of Gnosticism was the redemp- 
tion of the individual soul, and “knowledge” was the 
divine gift to man, the illumination by which that 
redemptive process was consummated. Less emotional 
in its processes, more magical in content than in the 
mystery religions, it still had as its ultimate basis 
the concept which was determining for the mystery 
religion. | 

In the Christian situation at Ephesus, both formu- 
lations were in the immediate field of vision. For 
the author of the Fourth Gospel “knowledge” as it 
figured in the mystery religions and in Gnosticism 
would be a familiar field. But one was knit with 
the daily experience of the Christian group and was 
coming closer and closer into affiliation with Chris- 
tian thought, and finally assimilated itself to the 
Christian system, as the vehicle for the expression of 
its mystical and speculative theories. 

The closer the ties between any two systems of 
thought, the sharper will be the reaction in either 
to that which is distasteful in the other. Hence, the 
reaction of Christianity to Gnosticism on the whole 
is more clearly defined than it is to the mystery reli- 
gions as a whole, and we know that total reaction 
more intimately than we know the total reaction to 
the mystery religions. 

But as regards the problem of ‘“‘knowledge” as a 
factor in religious experience, the Fourth Gospel is 
reacting to a characteristically Hellenistic concept in 
both systems, a considerable factor in what Reitzen- 
stein has called ‘Hellenistic theology,” a factor which 
appears side by side, with only minor individual modi- 
fications in the redemption cults and in the eclectic 
process which produced the heresy of Gnosticism. 


> 


100 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


With the Fourth Gospel’s reaction to that concept 
we must presently reckon. 


(6) In Hermetic Speculation and the Magical Papyri 


A special form of non-Christian mysticism as it 
appeared on Egyptian soil presents itself in the Her- 
metic literature. The relationship of this form of 
mystical speculation to Christianity has long been a 
controversial field of study, and complete consensus 
of opinion has not been reached either as to the date 
of the Hermetic writings nor as to their influence 
upon Christian thought. 

At one end of the scale was Granger’s early posi- 
tion that the Poimandres collection is homogeneous 
and of Christian origin.t At the other was Reitzen- 
stein’s well known theory that the Hermetic litera- 
ture was of an early date and was influential in shap- 
ing the thought of Philo and the writings of the 
Christian movement.” And between these two many 
intermediate positions have been expressed.® 


*Frank Granger, The Poimandres of Hermes Trimegistos, 
Journal of Theological Studies, 5, pp. 395 ff. 

*Reitzenstein, Poimandres. 

*Prof. Reitzenstein’s theory which appeared in 1904 as- 
sumed that the writings presupposed an Hermetic “com- 
munity” in existence at the time of the birth of Jesus, and 
of very early origin. The doctrines were said to represent 
a combination of Stoic and Egyptian ideas from primitive 
times. The “Gemeinde,” according to the theory, continued 
until the fourth century A.D. and spread during these centu- 
ries to Rome where it absorbed related groups of thinkers, 
and exerted an appreciable influence upon the thought of 
the New Testament writers. The theory has not met with 
wide acceptance except with modifications and abundant 
literature has brought correction to bear upon it. 

Reitzenstein’s book was reviewed by Granger in the Jour- 
nal of Theological Studies, VIII, p. 635, in which review 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 10! 


A word as to the nature of these writings before 
we proceed to the examination of their notions about 
man’s relation to God. By an ancient literary con- 
vention in Egypt, the writings of the scribes were 
attributed to Thot, the patron god of science and 


appeared a modification of Granger’s earlier view which 
had been expressed previous to Reitzenstein’s work. Here 
Granger disclaims the homogeneity previously asserted and 
suggests “Christian influence” instead of complete Christian 
origin. 

A careful examination of the theory is presented in the 
appendix to Krebs, Der Logos als Heiland, in which dis- 
agreement with Reitzenstein’s theory is expressed, particu- 
larly with the early dating. Krebs shows that there is little 
external evidence for a date earlier than the fourth century. 
The alleged influence of the literature upon the Shepherd 
of Hermas, Krebs finds is due to Reitzenstein’s disregard of 
the Old and New Testament imagery in Hermas, and in the 
use of the anthropos doctrine as an indication of early date. 
He finds that Reitzenstein has taken too little account of the 
actual nature of the doctrine and its use by Philo. With- 
out the early dating of the Poimandres, much of the rest of 
Reitzenstein’s theory must undergo modification—that which 
has to do with the extent of its influence. 

To the present writer a middle position commends itself, 
i.e. that the Poimandres represents the expression of a 
rather long development of religious speculation, whose 
origin was certainly pre-Christian, but whose literary ex- 
pression is probably contemporaneous with early Christian- 
ity, and perhaps partly anterior to it. The question of the 
date of this particular expression of Hermetic thought is 
not for our purposes a pressing one. No expression of 
religious ideas springs full-armed into being. Such remains 
as we have, indicate a school of thought of considerable 
duration, and acquaintance with the literature by the author 
of the Fourth Gospel is not necessary to his general famil- 
iarity with the principles which it represents. In so cosmo- 
politan a city as Ephesus, in so syncretistic an age as the 
one in which the Fourth Gospel was written, general 
acquaintance with contemporaneous systems of religious 
thought may without undue boldness be assumed. 


I02 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


literature, a convention to which reference is made 
by Plato.4 This Egyptian god Thot is sometimes 
identified by early writers with the Greek Hermes ® 
and sometimes is represented as his son,® but the two 
are closely enough identified so that for all practical 
purposes the equation between them is correct. Hermes 
is represented in the Hermetic corpus as accepting 
the ideas of Thot. The largest and most significant 
group of writings which remain from the Hermetic 
group is a collection which bears the name Poimandres, 
a set of some eighteen pieces, dealing with the nature 
of God, of the world and of the soul, in which the 
redemption motif plays an important part. 

The new birth to a life which is characterized by 
the life of God in the individual is the goal of man’s 
life as revealed in the conversation between Hermes 
and his son Thot.* The essence of this new life is 
gnosis, knowledge of God. Both Kroll ® and Reitzen- 
stein ® have clearly demonstrated that the noun yvéors, 
which ordinarily demands an objective genitive, has 
come to be employed in so technical a sense in the 
Poimandres that the object needs no longer to be ex- 
pressed. And what is the character of the gnosis in 
the Poimandres? 

Gnosis is equated with the state of oneness with 
God, and is the equivalent of salvation. 


* Phedr, 274 C; and Philebus, 18 B. 

° Cicero, de Nat. Deor., Ill, 56. 

° Poimandres, Reitzenstein’s text, p. 339. Cf. Hermes 
Trimegistos, by St. George Stock, E.R.E., VI, p. 626. 

"Reitzenstein, Poimandres, p. 339. 

*Kroll, Die Lehren des Hermes Trismegistos Beitrdge zur 
Geschichte der Philosophie der Mittelalters, 1914, p. 353. 

*Reitzenstein, Die Hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen, p. 
113. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 103 


“This is the good end for those who have gained gnosis 
—to be made one with God.” ” 


“Be not then carried off by the fierce flood, but using 
the shore current, ye who can, make Salvation’s port, 
and harboring there, see ye for one to take you by the 
hand and lead you unto Gnosis’s gates.” 


“This is the sole salvation for a man, God’s Gnosis. 
This is the way up to the Mount.” ® 


The greatest evil in life is ignorance of God, as we 
learn from the title of the little sermon in the Her- 
metic Corpus.?° 

The method or process by which man received the 
gnosis was a vision experience, a rebirth, as Hermes 
explained to his son Thot: 


“What may I say, my Son? I can but tell thee this. 
Whene’er I see within myself the simple vision (&xAaotoy) 
brought to birth out of God’s mercy, I have passed 
through myself into a body that can never die. And 


now I am not what I was before but I am born in 
Mind 99 44 


It comes by the road of illumination: 


“O blessed Gnosis, by thee illumined, hymning through 
thee, the Light that mind alone can see, I joy in Joy of 
the mind.”* 


It comes as a gift, as a result of ecstatic vision, rather 
than of the operation of man’s reason or under- 
standing: 


“Tt chanced upon a time my mind was meditating on 
the things that are, my thought was raised to a great 
* Poimandres, 26; Mead, Thrice Greatest Hermes, p. 16. 


“ Cor. Herm., VII, 2. 
sh Oy Ts a's ie * XIII, 3. * XIII, 18; also I, 32. 


104 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


height, the senses of my body being held back—just as 
men are who are weighed down with sleep after a fill of 
food, or from fatigue of the body.” ” 


The condition of the ecstasy cannot be described 
merely by saying that the bodily senses are in abeyance. 
Like all mystical experience it defies description in 
terms of the ordinary life of man. With swift strokes 
that extraordinary condition is figured forth: 


“Make then thyself to grow to the same stature as 
the Greatness which transcends all measure; leap forth 
from every body; transcend all Time; become Eternity; 
and (thus) shalt thou know God. Conceiving nothing is 
impossible unto thyself; think thyself deathless and able 
to know all—all arts, all sciences, the way of every life. 

“Become more lofty than all height, and lower than 
all depth. Collect into thyself all senses of all creatures 
—of fire (and) water, dry and moist. That thou art 
at the same time in every place—in earth, in sea, in sky; 
not yet begotten, in the womb, young, old, dead, in after- 
death conditions. And if thou knowest all these things 
at once,” times, places, doings, qualities, and quantities, 
thou canst know God.” * 


This is the language of ecstasy pure and simple, the 
attempt to transcend all known experience in relating 
that which has carried one beyond the bounds of 
reflective or rational processes. It defies description; 
it must be experienced to be appreciated, but such 
appeal as can be made by the one who has experienced 
it, to those who desire it, must be made by the avenue 
of feeling, for feeling, and not reason, has been the 
avenue through which it came to him. 

og Fare 

* Alternate rendering by Mead: “art similarly conscious 


of.” 
“XI, 20. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 105 


The function of gnosis is salvation, its processes are 
ecstatic, and its end is nothing short of deification 
itself; participation in the divine nature, as we have 
seen—‘‘being made one with God.!® And the closing 
prayer of the Poimandres reveals that the one who re- 
ceives it thinks of himself as a channel through which 
gnosis may be mediated to others who have not yet 
received it: 


“Give ear to me who pray that I may ne’er of gnosis 
fail . . . and fill me with thy power and with this 
Grace (of thine) that I may give the light to those in 
ignorance.” ” 


But of the actual content and function of gnosis in 
this Hermetic mysticism, no better exposition can be 
found than that of the Adéyog téhetog of the Papyrus 
Mimaut whose text Reitzenstein has reconstructed. 
It is worthy of being quoted at length because of its 
direct bearing upon the problem before us: 


“We render thee thanks, Most High, for by thy grace 
we have received this light of knowledge (gnosis) namely 
the unutterable name honored by the appellation, God, 
and blessed by the invocation, Father. For to all men 
and women thou hast exhibited a fatherly good-will and 
affection and friendship and most sweet influence. For 
thou hast graciously bestowed upon us, mind, reason, 
knowledge (votw, Adyov, yv@oww) mind that we may 
know thee, reason that we may take account of thee, 
knowledge that having discerned thee, we may rejoice. 
Having been saved by thee, we rejoice, for thou hast made 
us to be, while in our bodies, partakers in the divine 
nature, through the vision of thyself. Thanks of man 
be to thee for our knowledge of thy greatness. We have 
known thee, O light discernible by intelligence alone: we 


” Supra, p. 83. ” Poimandres, No. 32. 


106 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


have known thee, O life of man’s life: we have known 
thee, O fertile womb of all things. Having worshiped 
thee, we have asked no boon of thy goodness except this 
—be pleased to preserve us in the knowledge of thyself, 
be entreated that we should not be turned away from 
this way of life.” * 


The central position of gnosis in the Hermetic scheme 
of religious thought is clear in this prayer; its func- 
tion in making man a partaker in the divine life, its 
processes as a divine gift of illumination to man, its 
effects as discernible in human life. As in the vision 
of Apuleius, the suggestion of permanence is given. 
The recipient walks in a different ‘‘way of life’ be- 
cause he has received it. Closer at this point to the 
Johannine concept than many of the Hellenistic ex- 
pressions of religious experience, the prayer makes 
gnosis the direct road to the participation in the life 
of God. 

In this connection, a word should be said concern- 
ing the magical papyri from Egypt which reveal the 
spells and formulas used by professional sorcerers from 
the third century B.c. to the fifth century a.p. Their 
range in subject matter is great, from recipes for the 
compounding of drugs and the making of ink, to 
formulas for producing love or hate, and for healing 
disease and raising from the dead.?*. In these manuals, 
the term “gnosis” often appears, and is regularly associ- 
ated with the notion “power,” that for which the magi- 
cians are seeking. One magician thanks God that 
he is: 

*Reitzenstein, Die Hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen, 
2nd Edit. 1920, pp. 136-137, translation from Morgan, The 
Religion and Theology of Paul, p. 136. 


* Glasse, The Mysteries and Christianity, Oliver and Boyd, 
Edinburgh, 1921, p. 59. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 107 


“now in possession of a nature that is Godlike, because 
he has been in contact with God.” 


Another prayer for Power reads: 


“T am he to whom . . . thou didst grant the gnosis 
of thy mighty name, which I shall keep secret, sharing 
it with no one.” 


As is natural in this context, the emphasis falls upon 
the secret nature of the knowledge received, though 
religious notions seem not wholly to be lost in the 
thought of the magical effects of the gnosis. 

Whatever the content of the Hermetic gnosis, 
whether of this simple variety which is magical in 
effect and has to do with the commonplace affairs of 
everyday life, or of the more mystical, religious char- 
acter in the higher ranges of experience—as exempli- 
fied by the prayer of the Adyos téAevog, where 
the soul finds immediate participation in the life of 
God—the processes are not those of contemplation or 
reflection, but those of illumination, feeling, and, in 
the extreme form, the way of actual ecstasy. ‘This is 
the atmosphere of the redemption religion. The soul 
is to be rescued and made a participant in the divine 
life. It is the home of emotion and the language of 
the redemption cult. Its gnosis is at home with the 
gnosis of the mystery religion. 

Other affinities with the mystery religions which the 
Hermetic literature exhibits might be mentioned, its 
use of astral speculation, its thought of man as the 
child of planetary spirits, its dualism in the thought 
of God and the world of matter, its central redemp- 
tion motif; but these are not our first concern. In the 
matter which lies directly before us, the conclusion is 
clear enough. 


108 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


Knowledge of God for the Hermetic speculation is a 
condition of religious emotion, exaltation at the mo- 
ment, and in the highest expression, of permanent 
exaltation of life. It comes to man through the gate- 
way of feeling rather than through that of reflection, 
and its function is redemptive. It is similar in con- 
tent and in process to the gnosis of the mystery 
religions. 

For the most part, the Hermetic mysticism remains 
upon a level which we have seen was reached by only 
the higher ranges of expression in the mystery cults. 
It is far more at home with the vision of Apuleius 
than with the concepts of the Dionysus cult. In its 
genuinely religious conception of the possibility of 
man’s sharing in the divine life, in its affirmation of 
permanence in that participation, in its thought of 
man’s life as a channel for the divine gnosis to be medi- 
ated to those who have not had the vision, it lives upon 
the higher levels of mystical experience. But with 
this recognition, our conclusion remains, that in funda- 
mental conceptions, it is akin to the mysticism of the 
mystery religions. 


(7) In the Odes of Solomon 


Suggestions have been made that the expression of 
religious mysticism, which lies closest in contemporary 
thought to the Johannine, is that in the little pseu- 
donymous collection of hymns known as the Odes of 
Solomon, and that perhaps some genetic relation- 
ship exists between the two.t ‘This collection of hymns 
was found some fifteen years ago by Dr. Rendel Harris 
in a Syriac manuscript of the sixteenth century, to- 


* Scott, “The Hellenistic Mysticism of the Fourth Gospel,” 
Am. Jour. of Theol., XX, p. 355. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 109 


gether with the Psalms of Solomon. Many of the 
hymns seem to be of Christian origin, and their use 
in the Pistis Sophia and in the work of Lactantius 
prove both their early date and the fact that they were 
known in Christian circles. Harnack thinks of them 
as Jewish in origin, but embellished by a Christian 
hand, with only two of them genuinely Christian 
productions.? 

Some have found, particularly in the sixth Ode, 
traces of Gnostic thinking; but Dr. Harris,? following 
Ryle and James,* maintains that there is nothing dis- 
tinctly Gnostic about this hymn, and no decisive word 
has yet been spoken about their date and origin. ‘The 
truth is that they reveal too little of their theological 
and philosophical background for us to be sure of their 
origin, and are varied enough in their religious out- 
look to make generalization unsafe. 

Whether they are actually Christian, or Jewish 
thought presented in Christian dress, it is certain that 
the prevailing mood which they now express is one 
of buoyant Christian hope, presented as the result of 
personal religious experience which would be congenial 
with a Christian outlook on life. Indeed they bear so 
close a resemblance to Johannine expression that Ryle 
and James have hinted at actual dependence, particu- 
larly in Ode 6, upon Johannine ideas. It would 
hardly seem, however, that the resemblances were suf- 
ficiently sustained throughout the poem to warrant a 
judgment of Johannine ancestry.® 

Whatever the final judgment upon the problem of 


*Harnack, Ein Jiidisch-Christliches Psalmbuch aus dem 
ersten Jahrhundert, 1910, Leipzig. 

*Rendel Harris, the Odes of Solomon, p. 13. 

*Ryle and James, the Psalms of Solomon, p. 160. 

° Harris, of. cit., p. 96. 


IIOQ KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


dependence, we cannot deny that we have here in this 
little hymn book much that is common to the mysti- 
cism of the Fourth Gospel, the warm personal religious 
hope, the intense fervor of devotion, the emphasis upon 
Truth and Love; the imagery which is used to describe 
a mystical union with deity, figures which represent 
the divine life in the believer as Light, flooding his 
being,® as milk or water nourishing his life,” as a door 
opening upon life. “The atmosphere of the poems is 
far from being alien to that of the Gospel. 

But what of the function of “knowledge” in the 
religious experience which is here portrayed? Fellow- 
ship with God is several times represented as being 
based upon knowledge. Sometimes that knowledge is 
represented as an attribute of God himself: 


“The Father of Knowledge is the word of knowledge; 
He who created me when yet I was not, knew what 
I should do when I came into being.” 


But it is also designated as an attribute of the believer: 


“IT was established on the rock of Truth, and even to 
the end I received his knowledge.” ® 


And here it is significant that a parallel expression for 
the experience of receiving “knowledge” is “drinking 
the living water.” ‘The relationship between God and 
man is several times depicted in terms of knowledge: 


“He hath appointed to knowledge its way. 
He hath filled me with the words of truth. 
He hath caused his knowledge to abound in me.” ™ 


“Tgnorance hath been destroyed because the knowledge 
of God hath arrived. 


*Odes 11 and 15. ° Ode 7. 
"Odes 8, 19, 30. * Ode 11. 
* Ode 17. * Ode 15. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS Ii! 


There shall be none that breathes without knowl- 
edge.” ™ 


But two passages reveal with such fullness the place 
that knowledge takes in the mystic’s experience of God 
that it will be worth while to quote them at length: 


“As the sun is the joy to them that seek for its day- 
break, so is my joy in the Lord; because He is my Sun 
and His rays have lifted me up; and His light hath 
dispelled all darkness from my face. In Him I have 
acquired eyes, and have seen His holy day: ears have 
become mine, and I have heard His truth. The thought 
of knowledge hath been mine and I have been delighted 
by means of it. The way of error I have left, and have 
walked towards Him, and have received salvation from 
Him, without grudging. And according to His bounty 
He hath given me, and according to His excellent beauty, 
He hath made me. I have put on incorruption through 
His name: and have put off corruption through His 
grace. Death hath been destroyed before my face, and 
Sheol hath been abolished by my word, and there hath 
gone up deathless life in the Lord’s land, and it hath 
been made known by his faithful ones and been given 
without stint to all those that trust in Him. Halle- 
lujah.” * | 

“T am a priest of the Lord and to Him I do priestly 
service, and to Him I offer the sacrifice of His thought. 
For His thought is not like the thought of the world 
nor the thought of the flesh, nor like them that work 
carnally. The sacrifice of the Lord is righteousness, and 
purity of heart and lips.” * 


Here are the familiar Johannine conceptions. Com- 
munion with God is like light upon the believer. 
Darkness is sharply opposed to it. Death is not a 
physical fact, but a spiritual condition, and communion 


™ Ode 7. * Ode 15. * Ode 20. 


II2 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


with God, which is “‘deathless life,” is its antithesis. 
“Knowledge” has its part in this great awakening to 
life. Knowledge is the possession of the believer and 
in it he has delight. In the second of the two quota 
tions, the figure of priesthood is used, but the writer 
explains that this is not to him a ritualistic service, 
but consists in “thinking God’s thoughts.” It moves 
in the realm of the Fourth Gospel thought, where 
knowing God is life eternal and where it is the truth 
that makes men free. 

The difficulties in the way of a comparison of this 
little hymn book with the Fourth Gospel are obvious. 
With the latter, we have a sustained consecutive piece 
of writing; with the former, a few lyrical bits which 
do not pretend to give a comprehensive view of reli- 
gious experience. One is confessedly a Christian for- 
mulation with an apologetic purpose; the other gives 
such disparate views of religion that we are at a loss 
to classify it. “The most that we may hazard is that 
the poet or group of poets behind the Odes of Solomon 
lived in a world of thought that was congenial with 
that of the author of the Fourth Gospel, whether 
there was formal affiliation between them or not. 

The fragmentary glimpses of the place of ‘“knowl- 
edge”’ in this mysticism do not afford us sufficient data 
for any sure analysis of its relations. “The general 
tenor of the thought, however, leads to the conclusion 
that the content of the term is emotional rather than 
intellectual. Praise is the cardinal attitude on the 
part of the mystic, and “thinking the thoughts of 
God” results in “flourishing in truth in the praise of 
His holiness.” 

The figures which portray the union with God are 
typically those of the emotional mystic. The poet 
feels himself a harp, over whose strings the Spirit of 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS IIl3 


the Lord moves.4* He goes up to the Light as if to a 
chariot.1®° Fellowship with God is distilled as dew, or 
rests upon him as a cloud.’ Praise gushes forth as 
water from a fountain or as honey from the comb.?8 
God is represented as speaking directly to him and 


crying, 

“Give me your soul, that I may give you my soul.”” 
The fellowship is described in terms of the most inti- 
mate and tender relationship: 


“I should not have known how to love the Lord if 
he had not loved me. For who is able to distinguish 
love, except the one that is loved? I love the Beloved, 
and my soul loves Him, and where His rest is, there 
also am I; and I shall be no stranger, for with the 
Lord Most High and Merciful, there is no grudging. 
I have been united to Him.” ” 


“Knowledge,” as we have seen, is repeatedly cited as 
a factor in this mystical experience, but of its content 
or of the process of securing it, we have too little data 
to warrant a generalization. “The general context of 
ideas would suggest a rather diffuse emotional experi- 
ence in which the feeling of communion with God is 
practically synonymous with the “knowledge” concept. 

Fascinating as is the problem of the relationship 
between these two formulations of religious experience, 
it cannot now be pressed further. It is possible for 
us only to recognize that another poet, or group of 
poets, of congenial temper with the author of the 
Fourth Gospel had given lyrical expression (or were 
perhaps so doing contemporaneously with his writing) 
to their notions of religious experience. Had they 


* Ode 6. ™ Ode 35. ” Ode 9. 
* Ode 38. * Ode 40. ” Ode 3. 


II14, KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


attempted a fuller exposition of the content of that 
experience, would they have still maintained congeni- 
ality with his view? ‘The most that we can say, is 
that as far as they went, their views were certainly 
not alien to the views of the Gospel. 

Problems of actual dependence between the two ex- 
pressions are not essential to our purpose. It is enough 
that ideas were current in circles of Jewish background 
of a mysticism that was truly Hellenistic in character. 
As Dr. Scott has said: 


“Tf they (the Odes) were anterior to the Gospel, they 
may possibly afford at least a partial key to its genesis. 
. But a hypothesis of this kind is difficult to main- 
tain in view of the evident relation of the Gospel to 
Gentile Christianity; and would only carry the problem 
a stage farther back, even if it could be established. For 
in any case, the mystical feeling which pervades the 
‘Odes’ cannot have been native to Judaism. Their Jew- 
ish origin would prove nothing more than that the Hel- 
lenistic ideas had blended themselves in some measure 
even with Palestinian thought.” ™ 


And so we are left with the consciousness of a fasci- 
nating problem, still unsolved, and not likely to be 
solved with the data now at our command. The 
Fourth Gospel mysticism is at home with the mysti- 
cism of the Odes, but it is not identical with it. The 
plus side of the relationship is with the Fourth Gospel, 
and the plus comprises among its elements a fuller 
content in its gnosis concept. Of that ‘“‘plus” we shall 
later have more to say. 


(8) In Pauline Christianity 


The attempt to see any aspect of the thought of the 
Fourth Gospel in relation to its environment, as reac- 


** Amer. Jour. of Theol., XX, p. 356. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 115 


tion either favorable to or critical of the world of 
thought which called it forth, must find its culmina- 
tion in the study of the Pauline concept. Scholarship 
has been accustomed to viewing the theology of the 
Fourth Gospel as a greater Paulinization of Paulin- 
ism: Paul’s thought of the Christian life as the experi- 
ence of the indwelling Christ, men have seen carried 
to its fullest realization in the mystical union of the 
believer with Christ in the Fourth Gospel; Paul’s 
antithesis of xveJua and od&e& carried over into 
the dualism represented by the children of light and 
the children of darkness in John; Paul’s thought of 
the sacramental nature of baptism and the Lord’s 
supper intensified by the Fourth Gospel to show their 
eternal and spiritual significance; Paul’s liberality in 
breaking, the bonds of Judaism universalized in the 
Johannine representation of Jesus drawing all men 
unto himself; Paul’s implicit acceptance of the new 
birth in his teaching about the “new man” taken up 
into the explicit new birth concept of John iii; Paul’s 
conception of the resurrection of Jesus as the pledge 
of resurrection for the individual given a more far- 
reaching significance and made more continuously 
meaningful in the abiding presence of Jesus in the 
hearts of believers. Paul’s gospel has been seen raised 
to a higher power in the Johannine presentation of 
Christianity. 

It is now our task to examine the concept of 
“knowledge of God” as it appears in Paulinism, to see 
whether this traditional view is sustained, but more 
imperatively, to see what light is thrown upon the 
position taken in the Fourth Gospel by its relation to 
the concept as it appears in Paul. But the concept 
finds its explanation only in relation to the larger 
structure of ideas, and there is little hope of under- 
standing it in isolation. 


116. KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


Much has been written upon the subject of the 
relationship of Paul to the world of Hellenistic think- 
ing, and in particular upon his relation to the mystery 
religions. It is not within our province to go into 
that intricate discussion which has already been fully 
and ably handled by such scholars as Loisy,? Ken- 
nedy,? Morgan,* Schweitzer,’ MReitzenstein,® and 
Lake.’ 

In the differing views represented in critical opinion 
by this list of writers, this much of agreement may be 
said to exist: that Christian thought did undergo a 
change through the teaching of Paul; that in form, at 
least, the adaptations which Christianity suffered under 
the hand of the great Apostle brought it closer to 
Hellenistic religion; in other words, that the language 
medium which was characteristic of the mystery reli- 
gions was adopted by Paul to commend the Christian 
message to the Hellenistic world. 

From here on opinions differ. Kennedy’s painstak- 
ing discussion of Reitzenstein’s philological researches 
adduces evidence to show that the mystery terminology 
employed by Paul is only a vehicle for thought which 
has closer affinities with Jewish religion than it has 
with the mystery cults. Loisy, on the other hand, con- 
siders that Christianity, existing first as a national 
religion with a salvation notion as its center, was 
transformed under the hand of Paul into a real mys- 

*For a full discussion of the history of Pauline criticism, 
cf. Schweitzer, Paul and His Interpreters. 

*Loisy, Les Mystéres paiéns et le Mystere chrétien. 

*Kennedy, St. Paul and the Mystery Religions. 

*Morgan, The Religion and Theology of Paul. 

° Schweitzer, op. cit. 


*Reitzenstein, Die Hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen. 
"Lake, The Earlier Epistles of Paul. 


YTS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 117 


tery ® with a theology, a sacramental system, and a 
promise of individual resurrection, in close correspond- 
ence with the mystery cults. Lake has assumed that 
the Gentile converts would so regard his teaching: 


“Tn the teaching of St. Paul as to the meaning of the 
death of Jesus, he saw every reason for equating the 
Lord with the Redeemer God of the mystery religions, 
with the advantage that this Redeemer possessed an his- 
toric character which could scarcely be claimed for Attis 
or Mithras. Similarly in Baptism and the Eucharist, he 
found ‘mysteries’ which could immediately be equated 
with other ‘mysteries,’ offering eternal life to those who 
partook of them. In other words, many of the Greeks 
must have regarded Christianity as a superior form of 
‘Mystery Religion.’ ”?® 


Now the difficulty for us lies here; as we have just 
recognized, there is no hope for the understanding of 
the gnosis concept apart from its general context of 
religious ideas. On the other hand, it is exactly 
through the study of such individual concepts as this, 
that we emerge with some true understanding of the 
general context of Paul’s thought. In other words, 
if we knew in general how closely Paul’s view of 
Christianity had shaped itself to the pattern of Hel- 
lenistic thought, we should (with limitations, of 
course) be ready to hazard an a priori estimate as to 
how he would be likely to handle the concept “knowl- 
edge,” and without the larger context, we cannot hope 
to understand the term. 

But on the other hand, we need the examination of 
just such single concepts as yv@otg, wvothoiov, mvetua, 
vous, etc., that we may arrive at any opinion as to 
how close the relationship is between the Hellenistic 


*Loisy, of. cit., Ch. VIII, 232 ff. ° Lake, of. cit., pp. 44-45. 


118 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


“mystery” and Pauline Christianity. We need 
not, however, be completely baffled by the dilemma. 
As we have said, a certain amount of agreement 
in critical opinion already exists. Suspending for 
the time any judgment upon the question in its en- 
tirety, we may accept as a working basis certain posi- 
tions which have received a fairly general acceptance, 
and proceed inductively therefrom to the examination 
of the gnosis concept. 

We may assume that primitive Christianity took 
shape as an enthusiastic social movement, organized 
about Jesus’s teaching of the Kingdom as a social ideal, 
the reign of God on earth, with standards for the indi- 
vidual which resulted from the Kingdom-teaching 
which was central. Placed as it was in a Palestinian 
community, where eschatological hopes had centered 
about a Messiah, those eschatological hopes, at the 
death of Jesus, assumed concrete salvation notions 
with relation to his second coming. 

He was the fulfillment of the highest hones of 
Judaism, and at his return all those promises of the 
reign of God on earth would find their fullest realiza- 
tion. Devotion to the personality of Jesus gave 
dynamic to the enthusiasm for his teaching, and pro- 
jected itself into a community organization of which 
expectancy was the very key-note. 

The rites of the primitive community were simple; 
baptism as a purification rite and as symbol of repent- 
ance had come as an inheritance from John the Bap- 
tist. Participation in the common meal was accepted 
not as a formal sacrament, but as a symbol of brother- 
hood and foretaste of the kingdom which they ex- 
pected so soon.?® ‘The institutions were an inheritance 


*E. F. Scott, The Beginnings of the Church, Lectures VII 
and VIII. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 119 


from Judaism. ‘The scriptures, the synagogue, were 
accepted as the basis of the institutional life of the 
community. Its ethics were of the “interim” sort, 
calculated only for the interval which they held to be 
short, until the intervention of the Kingdom. 

Upon this background was projected the work of 
the great Apostle, who, himself a product of both 
Judaism and the culture of the Greco-Roman world, 
set forward the process which we know as the Hel- 
lenization of Christianity. It must not be forgotten 
that Paul was not the initiator of this process. ‘The 
Hellenization of Judaism had begun with the con- 
quest of the East by Alexander. All the forces of a 
great world-syncretizing process were already let loose, 
and Christianity, as a social movement, could never 
have withstood it if it were to survive at all. 

Of the two decades between the ministry of Jesus 
and the Gentile mission of Paul, we know all too little, 
but such evidence as we have indicates the beginnings 
of contacts that must inevitably lead to a Helleni- 
zation of the Christian movement itself,++ 

But, geographically speaking, it was the activity of 
Paul which brought the Christian movement into 
direct relation with the religious thought of the Hel- 
lenistic world, and it was under the impress of his 
teaching that its actual content began to take on the 
dress of Hellenistic religion. In an admirable article 
entitled “Paul and Hellenism,” +2 R. Knopf has sug- 
gested as axiomatic the following points in which 
Paul’s adaptation of Christianity for the Gentile world 
reveals the ways of Hellenistic thinking: the antithesis 
between flesh and spirit, and the closely related 

* Acts i-viii.; xi. 19 ff; x. 8-26. 

“Knopf, “Paul and Hellenism,” Amer. Jour. of Theol., 
1914, XVIII, pp. 497 ff. 


120 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


bias toward asceticism; the notion of supra-mundane 
powers, great spirits of heaven (xoopoxedtoges) who 
hold man within their power and from whose dominion 
he is to be freed; the conception of ‘“‘mystery”; and 
the activity of a savior-god.7* 

In the two fundamental positions of his religious 
theory, Knopf, with Loisy, Reitzenstein, and: others 
already mentioned, finds Paul in agreement with Hel- 
lenistic thought, in his mystical doctrine of redemp- 
tion—his Christ-mysticism which he describes as being 
éy Xotot@—and in his conception of the sacramental 
nature of baptism and the Lord’s supper. But this is 
the point at which the ways divide. 

Schweitzer, Kennedy, and Clemen ‘are convinced 
that the differences outweigh the likenesses, and. that 
these are the very concepts which hold Pauline Chris- 
tianity aloof from the mystery religions. We cannot 
here press that main question further, but-should pro- 
ceed to the examination of the concept “knowledge” 
as it figures in the scheme of religious thought 
expressed by the Apostle. 

That which first appears in our consideration of the 
concept in Pauline Christianity is that it does not hold 
a uniform connotation throughout the letters. ‘“Ihe 
word of knowledge” put alongside the “word of wis- 
dom” in I Corinthians viii, as a gift of the Spirit, its 
use in the same letter at xiv. 6 as a designation of one 
of the qualities which would give weight to the prac- 
tice of the glossalalia, would suggest a very general 
meaning for the term, the perceptive, or intelligent 
faculty in human consciousness.** 

Occasionally it is applied to the wisdom which God 
himself possesses, as infinite and unsearchable, a 

4 OP. -cit., pi, $13: 

“Cf. also Rom. ii. 20; II Cor. vi. 6; Eph. iv. 13. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS IZ! 


thought which is clearly rooted in the Judaistic con- 
cept of the Wisdom of God.'® But we come close to 
the characteristic usage of the term in Paul, in the 
I Cor. xiv passage, in the relationship that is sug- 
gested between yv@ois, “knowledge,” and dxoxdAvyis 
“revelation:” 


“But now, brethren, if I come unto you speaking with 
tongues, what shall I profit you, unless I speak to you 
either by way of revelation, or of knowledge?” 


And again this collocation of ideas appears in 
Ephesians i. 17,1° where the prayer is that God may 
give the “spirit of wisdom and revelation in the 
knowledge (éxvyvacev) of him;” so that their hearts 
may be enlightened, that they may know what is the 
hope of his calling. This is the illumination which 
is the gift of the Spirit, the divine ydovowa which 
is coincident with the “putting on of the new man 
in Christ Jesus.” The figure of illumination is most 
forcefully put in II Corinthians iv. 6: 


“Seeing it is God, that said, Light shall shine out of 
darkness, who shined in our hearts, to give the light of 
the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus 
Christ.” 


Knowledge is listed as one of the gifts of the Spirit, 
along with speaking with tongues, and the gift of 


* Cf. Sanday, Romans in I. C. C., p. 340. 

7 References to the Ephesian letter are offered with the 
recognition that, by all readers, they will not be accepted as 
first-hand Pauline expression. For the present writer the 
problem of the genuineness of the Ephesian letter remains 
an open question in which the balance of the evidence seems 
prejudicial to Pauline authorship. 


I22 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


prophecy,?? but is made subordinate to love in the 
human relationship, and is designated as surpassed by 
love in the divine relationship: 


“Tf I know all mysteries and all knowledge . . . but 
have not love, I am nothing.” * 


“To know the love of Christ which passeth knowl- 
edge.” © 


Nevertheless, this gnosis is represented as lying close to 
the heart of religious experience,” and it is at least a 
part of the goal toward which the Christian sets his 
face: 


“Till we all attain unto the unity of the faith and 
of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full-grown 


man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness 
of Christ.” * 


Twice it figures in the little definition of religious ex- 
perience which introduces his letter to the Colossians: 


“For this cause we also since the day we heard it, do 
not cease to pray and make request for you, that ye 
may be filled with the knowledge of his will, in all 
spiritual wisdom and understanding to walk worthily of 
the Lord, unto all pleasure, bearing fruit in every good 
work and increasing in the knowledge of God.” ™ 


The “knowledge” which is divine is sharply con- 
trasted with the knowledge which is of this world,”* 
and even within the Christian group he holds that 
some have accepted an inferior knowledge, in their 
interest in angels, and are a source of contamination 

ACCORD Soe Eph. iii. 19. 7 Eph. iv. 13. 

7 Cor. xiii. 2. * Eph. i. 17. * Col. i. 9. 

* Col.'11.8% 1 Cor. ii, 10° f:3 TT Core xis. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 123 


to others.24 Even the knowledge which is of the Spirit 
knows certain gradation. 

There is the wisdom that is for the “full-grown,” 75 
revealed through the Spirit (and the word employed 
is tedeloic, the same as that applied in the mysteries 
to those who are full initiates), which “‘searcheth the 
deep things of God.” ?° But there is the knowl- 
edge that is simpler, ‘the milk” which one takes before 
he is ready for the “meat.” 2’ ‘The ironical reply to 
the Corinthian question about meat sacrificed to idols 78 
suggests these gradations. ‘There is a kind of “knowl- 
edge” that “‘puffeth up,” but that pride is an indication 
that, 


“he knoweth not yet as he ought to know.” 


The true “knowledge” of God has its roots in love,?® 
and the consummation of these gradations will be 
reached when the Christian shall know God fully, even 
as he is now fully known by God.*° 

It is here that we are led directly into the question 
of the content of this gnosis in the Pauline scheme of 
thought. Morgan * believes that it covers speculative 
theology and eschatology, and merges into practical 
moral insight. Eschatology is surely suggested in the 
wisdom of which he speaks in I Corinthians ii. 9, and 
its connection with ethics or moral insight is repeat- 
edly affirmed,** but the heart of this knowledge is the 
Gospel of Christ crucified, whose spirit is indwelling 
in man. It is appreciation of the factors which make 


Colac 18: * TI: Cor. if. 10: #1 Cor. viii. 1. 
st PO eT Oe =D Cors.tit “I Cor. viii. 3. 
©T Cor. xiii. 12. 

* Morgan, The Religion and Theology of Paul, p. 166 ff. 
1 Cor. i. 9; viii. 1-13. 


I24 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


up the redemptive process for man. Paul claimed 
that his whole Gospel came to him directly by revela- 
tion,?* and we have but now noted the close association 
of “knowledge” with the term “revelation.” That 
Gospel, he said, consisted of two parts: ‘““His Son in 
me” and the conviction that a personal mission was 
entailed for him: 


“That I might preach him among the Gentiles.” 


Later he sums up the whole Gospel as follows: - 


“Tf thou shalt confess with thy mouth Jesus as Lord, 
and shalt believe in thy heart that God hath raised him 
from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” * 


And most significantly for us, he brings the content of 
the “knowledge” directly before us: 


“Yea, verily I count all things to be loss for the excel- 
lency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord, for 
whom I suffered the loss of all things, and do count 
them but refuse that I may gain Christ . . . that I 
may know him and the power of his resurrection and 
the fellowship of his sufferings.” ® 


The content of the revelation, then, is Christ cruci- 
fied, but risen and giving resurrection to all men. 
Hints that it is more than this appear. It is a per- 
sonal relationship with God. Nowhere is this more 
clearly shown than in the passages where the Apostle 
corrects himself. To know God is rather to be known 
by him: 


“Howbeit at that time, not knowing God, ye were 
in bondage to them that by nature are no gods: but 
now that ye have come to know God, or rather to be 


* Gal. i, rr. * Rom. x. 9. * Phil, iii, 8-ro. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 125 


known by God, how turn ye back again to the weak 
and beggarly rudiments?” ” 


And again in I Corinthians viii.3 the same relationship 
is suggested : 


“Tf any man loveth God, the same is known by him.” 


And, as we have already seen, the consummation of 
knowledge is to know God even as God already fully 
knows the individual.2* That gnosis is not merely 
recognition of the facts which constitute the redemp- 
tive process, but partakes of the nature of a personal 
relationship, seems here implied, but here we move 
into the realm of the unio mystica of Paul which 
is more characteristically expressed by the term 
év Xotot.*® 

For Paul, gnosis was always in a secondary position 
because faith was the center of his theology, and faith 
merged imperceptibly into the state of mystical union 
with Christ. He can touch first one and then the 
other, with hardly a shade of difference in meaning: 


“T have been crucified with Christ; yet I live and yet 
no longer I but Christ liveth in me; and the life which 
I now live in the flesh, I live in faith, the faith which 
is in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself 
for me.” ” | 


* Gal. iv. 8-9. SL Cor. xii, 2. 

* This interpretation is taken by Kennedy, but is rejected 
by Burton Scott Easton in an article “The Pauline Theology 
and Hellenism,” in the Amer. Jour. of Theol., XXI, 1917, 
pp. 358 ff. Mr. Easton takes the verb “to know” in the 
Old Testament sense of “regard with favor,” citing Amos 
iii. 2, Ps. i.6 and cxliv.3. In the judgment of the present 
writer, Mr. Easton’s interpretation does not give sufficient 
weight to the social or collective connotation of the term in 
the Old Testament passages cited. 

*” Gal. ii. 20. 


126 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


Nowhere does he elucidate the relationship existing 
in his mind among these terms xvedpa, yv@ou, mlotis 
and év Xovord, but their close connection is steadily 
implied. Faith is presented as the sole condition 
of salvation,*? but the actual conditions of life 
in which faith expresses itself constitute the state of 
mystical union with Christ (év Xowt®). Tvaots 
figures as part of that steady relationship (for 
the Christ-mysticism is everywhere recognized as 
equivalent to God-mysticism)*! and is both the intel- 
lectual appreciation of the meaning of the death and 
resurrection of Christ and the active personal fel- 
lowship which faith implies. Both ztotig and 
yv@og are of supernatural origin, gifts of the Spirit, 
and all the terms are thus drawn together in a rela- 
tionship so close that it is almost impossible to extricate 
them, one from another. 

The content, then, of the gnosis is characteristically, 
realization of the process which constitutes redemption 
for man, the death and resurrection of Jesus, but it is 
this with a plus, a plus which, as Morgan has indi- 
cated,*? leads on the one hand, to ethical insight, and 
on the other, to the permanent mystical relationship 
with God, more usually expressed under the category 
of “being in Christ.” 

But a word should be said of the steps which lead 
to the acceptance of the gnosis by man. Always the 
assumption is that it is a supernatural gift, but on 
man’s side, what steps are to be taken to appropriate 
that gift? No rules are prescribed, but a state of 
ecstasy is steadily implied, and the tone of Paul’s 
urgency in writing to his converts of this most central 


Gal. iii. and Rom. iv. 
“Morgan, op. cit., p. 122. 
“Morgan, op. cit., p. 167. 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 127 


fact in Christian experience is one of emotional in- 
tensity and eagerness. 

His own experience Paul describes as an appearance 
of Jesus “as to one untimely born,” ** and the ecstasy 
is more fully characterized in II Corinthians xii: 


“Whether in the body, I know not; or whether out 
of the body, I know not. God knoweth. Such a one 
caught up even to the third heaven... how that he 
was caught up into Paradise and heard unspeakable 
words which it is not lawful for a man to utter.” 


And Paul nowhere goes into greater detail than this 
in his teaching to his converts as to how the gnosis 
should be acquired by man. His almost complete 
indifference to the facts of Jesus’s life and the content 
of his teaching, with the high stress on the facts of his 
death and resurrection show that no reflective process 
upon the personality and ethical teaching of Jesus is, 
in his mind, asked for. It is the grace of God which 
gives the vision.** 


It is the vision of the gnosis which makes the 
man xvevuatixds, but the vision comes not as the re- 
sult of man’s effort in the ethical realm, nor as the 
result of his achievement in the field of reason or 
reflection. It is to the end a supernatural gift accom- 
panied by emotional states, which in his own case at 
least can only be described in terms of ecstasy. 

Modern psychology recognizes many factors in 
Paul’s experience preceding the Damascus road cata- 
clysm which functioned to produce it—high tension, as 
a result of long inner conflict centering about the sense 
of guilt occasioned by his relation to a tyrannical 
ancient law; reflection upon “the new Way” and its 


“1 Cor. xv. 8. “T Cor. xv. 10. 


128 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


power to produce such radiant living and such gallant 
dying as he had witnessed in his contact with Stephen; 
intellectual appreciation of the failure of legalism as 
a guide for life, and an inward struggle against what 
was dear in tradition and in inheritance. 


But however much modern psychology does to ex- 
plain the process today, for Paul no such analysis 
existed. “To him it was vision under the category of 
supernaturalism, and ecstasy was the state in which it 
came. ‘To his converts, he gave it thus, and he asked 
from them no more than he himself had _ received. 
The vision with its gnosis came first; upon it he 
reared a superstructure of argument about his great 
themes—pre-destination, justification, glorification; but 
reflection upon these was not to him the pre-requisite 
for the supernatural gift. Gnosis remained to the end 
for Paul a gift of the Spirit, which man receives by 
the grace of God, whose gateway into human experi- 
ence was the gateway of ecstatic conversion. 


To the present writer, the kinship between Paul’s 
conception of gnosis and that of the Hellenistic re- 
ligions of redemption is unmistakable, a kinship that 
is deeper than that of mere terminology. Reitzen- 
stein has demonstrated from the philological point 
of view the relationship between yv@otg and svetua 
in the mystery religion cycle of ideas. But we can 
carry the relationship over into the Pauline scheme. 
The gnosis of which Paul speaks is, like the gnosis 
of the mystery religions, a divine gift which makes 
the man zvevuatinds. As Reitzenstein affirms, it is 
never merely equivalent to “rational knowledge.” 
It makes a man capable of being év Xovor@ and is 
necessary to the redemptive process. Both the gnosis 
of the mystery religions and the gnosis of Paul have 


ITS USE IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIONS 129 


as their content the process which constitutes redemp- 
tion for man. 

Both find their operation best described under the 
figure of illumination. Both imply the state of ecstasy 
in their reception by man. Both suggest grades of 
gnosis, of simple character for the inexperienced, and 
of deeper significance for the seasoned adherent of the 
faith. Both are rooted in a dualistic world-view, and 
think of the gnosis as a factor in the new birth which 
redeems man from the world of sin and death. © 

By no means does this comparison wish to suggest 
that the gnosis of Paul is identical with that of the 
mystery religions. Its rooting in historical fact, in- 
stead of myth, its inseparable connection in Paul’s 
mind with the ethical values in life, its dignity in the 
treatment of the spiritual life, would distinguish Paul’s 
conception of gnosis at once from the characteristic 
view of the mystery religions. But more than this, 
the great force of a vital personality has been thrown 
into it, carrying with it the dignity, the sobriety, and 
at the same time, the exuberant energy that only a 
great personality can give. 

The gnosis of Paul had had poured into it the dyna- 
mic of a personality so committed to the Christian ex- 
pression of religion that he could say that all life to 
him was Christ. With full recognition of the different 
levels upon which the two concepts lie, it appears to 
this writer inevitably necessary to recognize that in 
its essential outlines, the gnosis of Paul conforms to 
the concept as found in the mystery religions of the 
Hellenistic world. 


IV 
ITS. MEANING IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


E have examined the religious world in which 
W\ the Fourth Gospel came into being to see how 
the concept “knowledge” lived in that world, 
in order that we might be in a better position to under- 
stand the actual content of, and the motive for the term 
which takes so central a place in the Gospel. We have 
seen that although the concept was sparingly used in 
Judaism, it had its place there, and that in Hellenistic 
circles it was a central religious concept, with fairly 
homogeneous connotations in the various systems of 
religion which we may assume to have been available 
in the Ephesian environment of the writer of the 
Fourth Gospel. 

It now becomes our task to return to the Fourth 
Gospel, and to try to state the relationship which the 
concept in the Gospel bears to its use in the systems 
which we have been examining. 

It may seem at first glance that the results of the 
study are mainly negative. “The Fourth Gospel, at 
all events, is not a reproduction, in its handling of 

“knowledge” in religious experience, of any one of the 
systems which made up its religious environment. In 
the Old Testament view of religion, which was essen- 
tially practical rather than mystical, we find only 
occasional flashes of thought which lead toward the 
Fourth Gospel notion of religion as individual com- 
munion with God. Where “knowledge of God” is 


130 


ITS MEANING IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT I3I 


assumed as an essential factor in religion, it habitually 
finds itself in close correlation with the idea of the 
ethical expression of religion. In prophetic expres- 
sion, it is knowledge of the character of Jahweh 
which compels an embodiment in human life of the 
values for which he stands, and this is an essentially 
different emphasis from that of the Fourth Gospel, 
where “knowledge of God” is intimate, personal, 
mystical fellowship. Only in Hosea and Jeremiah 
appear the foreshadowings of that relationship be- 
tween the individual and God, in the handling of the 
“knowledge” concept. 

But the author of the Fourth Gospel has accepted 
the correlation of the “knowledge” concept with eth- 
ical expression in living, in his insistence upon love in 
the beloved community, in the steady alternation of the 
“love” and “belief? motifs. The Wisdom concept of 
Hebrew thought finds its relationship to the Fourth 
Gospel, rather in its later development in Hellenistic 
Judaism and particularly in Philo as it merges into the 
doctrine of the Logos, than in its expression in the 
canonical writings. 

We found little in late Palestinian Judaism to 
which our concept is indebted. Where the Fourth 
Gospel finds itself at home in the thought of first 
century, Palestinian Judaism is not in either of its two 
most characteristic tendencies of thought, legalism or 
apocalypticism, but rather in those aspects of its think- 
ing which are themselves, without doubt, the result of 
adaptation to Hellenistic ways of thought: in its uni- 
versalism, its individualism, and in its increasing em- 
phasis on the spiritual aspects of religious experience. 

But these factors in religious thought are the mere 
framework upon which such a concept as that of the 
Fourth Gospel “knowledge” can be built. They are 


132 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


far from carrying us to the heart of the question of 
the content, or the motive for the concept, which we 
are seeking to understand. 

In Hellenistic Judaism, on the other hand, and 
especially in Philo, we find much that is congenial 
with the Fourth Gospel notion of religious experience. 
For Philo, as for the Fourth Gospel, the heart of 
religion is the quest of the individual soul for God, and 
among the factors which assist the soul in the realiza- 
tion of the quest is the Logos, which is at once the 
rational principle in the universe and the chief me- 
diator between God and man. ‘That the Fourth Gos- 
pel accepted the Philonic Logos, at least in its main 
outlines, as the means for introducing and commending 
its message to the Hellenistic world, there can be little 
doubt. 

But it can hardly be said to have adopted with it 
the Philonic idea of the place of “knowledge” in 
religious experience. Philo made much of “reason” in 
his handling of the religious life of man, giving it a 
superior place over the sense-activity of human beings, 
but when he came actually to the discussion of the 
highest form of union with God, he discarded reason, 
and accepted the way of ecstasy, emotional exaltation, 
in which intellectual factors had been given a distinctly 
secondary place. 

In this direction Philo shares in the general Hel- 
lenistic interpretation of religious experience as we 
found it exemplified in the mystery religions, in Gnos- 
ticism, in Hermetism, and partially at least in the 
Odes of Solomon. For Hellenistic religion, gnosis is 
man’s possession, not through the exercise of any 
rational or reflective processes, but by reason of an 
illuminating experience which has brought him light 
from the heavenly realm. ‘Knowledge’ is a divine 


ITS MEANING IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 133 


gift, which, both in its content and in the process by 
which it is acquired, is separated from the intellectual 
aspects of man’s life. Ecstasy, rather than reflection, 
is its accompanying state, and the steps by which man 
arrives at this ecstasy are confessedly those which tend 
to bring intellectual processes into abeyance, and 
emotional states to the fore. 

In the higher ranges of this Hellenistic thinking, the 
permanence of the relationship is affirmed, and the 
more spiritual aspects of its nature are stressed, as in 
the vision of Apuleius and in the Hermetic literature, 
but the processes remain even here, emotional and 
ecstatic, rather than rational or reflective. The Odes 
of Solomon, which seem in many respects to lie close 
to the thought of the Fourth Gospel, are too frag- 
mentary an expression upon which to base a generaliza- 
tion concerning their influence as motive or control 
over the Fourth Gospel view, and the partial glimpse 
afforded of the mystical experience of the Odes gives 
no such place to “knowledge” as we find given by the 
Fourth Gospel. 

Pauline Christianity, with all its wide departures 
from the mystery religions, appears in this investigation 
of its gnosis concept to have allied itself with Hel- 
lenistic modes of thinking in its treatment of the con- 
cept. His “gospel,” as Paul termed it, had come by 
revelation, and the accompanying state was ecstasy. 
Paul’s preaching of Christianity asked from his con- 
verts no process of rational or reflective endeavor pre- 
ceding the acceptance of the revelation. 

His arguments concerning justification, sanctifica- 
tion and glorification rest as a superstructure upon a 
gospel already received in its entirety by revelation. 
“Faith,” which is the Pauline equivalent for our con- 
cept “gnosis,” and which is used almost interchange- 


134 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


ably with it by him is a function of the will and of 
the emotions rather than of the mind. 

For the Fourth Gospel, Dr. Scott affirmed that 
“knowledge” lay in this same category. And here is 
the crux of our study; the investigation of the Hel- 
lenistic notion of “knowledge” as.a factor in religious 
experience and of the place that that concept holds in 
the Fourth Gospel has compelled the present writer 
to disagree with Dr. Scott’s interpretation of the case. 

Dr. Scott has allowed a unique form of mysticism 
in the Fourth Gospel, not pantheistic like the Hermetic 
literature, not completely dualistic like the Mystery 
cults; more completely integrated with ethical princi- 
ples than either, and more concrete, in its grounding 
upon historical fact rather than upon myth or abstrac- 
tion. With all this, the present writer is in agreement, 
but is compelled to take a further step—that the 
Fourth Gospel differentiates itself also from Hellen- 
istic religion in this very concept under consideration, 
the one in which Dr. Scott has not allowed for 
difference. 

The thesis which this study offers is that whereas 
Paul has been content to accept the truly Hellenistic 
notion of “knowledge,” the author of the Fourth 
Gospel writes in reaction from it, with the conscious 
intent to pour into the term more of both intellectual 
and ethical content, and that in this respect his Gospel 
represents a swing away from the Hellenistic religions 
of redemption rather than a more complete acceptance 
of their theology.* 

We have previously noted the Hebrew prophetic 
correlation of knowledge with. ethical idealism, ac- 
cepted without argument by the author of the Fourth 


*Dr. Scott’s position in his earlier work, The Fourth 
Gospel, lies closer to the view of this paper, pp. 270 ff. 


ITS MEANING IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 135 


Gospel, which in itself gives a color to the concept 
not characteristically Hellenistic. ‘This is not to say 
that ethical values were net stressed in the Hellenistic 
religions; evidence can be adduced to show that the 
good and moral life was’sometimes urged. But ethical 
interests were always subordinate in Hellenistic reli- 
gion to other aims, and never reached a position of 
supreme importance. 

With both Paul and the Fourth Gospel, them is 
stress on the ethical side of religious experience, but 
with a difference. For Paul, moral renewal is the 
result of the new birth. Man is now dead to sin,? 
and moral fruits appear in the actual conduct of life. 
Virtues are listed as among the fruits of the Spirit.® 
For the Fourth Gospel, on the other hand, the 
ethical aspects of the religious life are summed 
up under the category of love, and the love of 
the brethren appears as the indispensable correlate 
of the “belief”? which constitutes the heart of religious 
experience. 


“A new commandment I give unto you that ye love 
one another.” * 


“Tf ye know these things, blessed are ye if ye do 
them.” ® 


And after the question to Philip: “Believest thou that 
I am in the Father, and the Father in me?” Jesus 
turns immediately to the moral aspect of that belief. 


“He that believeth on me, the works that I do, he 
shall do also.’ ° 


“Tf ye love me, ye will keep my commandments.” * 


?Rom. vi. 1-8: xiv; Gal. v.24; I Cor. xii. 4 ff.; Col. ii. rz. 
* Gal. v.22. 5 xiii. 17. "xiv. 15. 
*John xiii. 34. ® xiv. ro. 


136 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


The spirit of the discourse material, from Chapter xii. 
on, is charged with this reciprocal Love-Belief rela- 
tionship. It is as if we were being shown two sides of 
one experience, neither one of which is complete with- 
out the other. ‘The integration of the two ideas, 
closer even than it is in Paul, marks the movement of 
the author’s ideas in a direction away from the thought 
of Hellenistic religion. 

But to come closer to the heart of the “knowledge” 
concept itself. On its Godward side, “knowledge” in 
the Fourth Gospel is, as Dr. Scott has said, a revela- 
tion—“that higher illumination by which we become 
aware of unseen realities.” ® Jesus declared himself 


the Light of the world. 


“He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness but 
shall have the light of life.” ° 


In the coming of Jesus, light came into the world.*° 


“T am come a light into the world.” ™ 


And believing in Jesus is described as “becoming sons 
of light.” 7% But are we right in assuming, as Dr. 
Scott does, that this “knowledge” on man’s side, “has 
nothing to do with any activity of the reason”?*® In 
the opinion of the present writer it is here that the 
Fourth Gospel takes its departure from the Hellenistic 
religions and from Paul, in presenting the gnosis of 
Christian experience as definitely connected with 
¥ rational and reflective activity in human nature. 

In the first place, the author of the Fourth Gospel 
in his choice of the biographical form for his message, 

® Scott, Hellenistic Mysticism in the Fourth Gospel, p. 350. 

* viii. 12. oe tt Be a 4 sii. 46. 2 xii. 36. 

* Scott, op. cit., p. 350. 


ITS MEANING IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 137 


calls for reflective activities which are antecedent in 
the process of redemption to the “belief” which is the 
heart of the experience. In an environment where 
there were current so many systems of religious 
thought as we have here reviewed, in which the vehicle 
for expression has been liturgies, hymns, dramatic 
rites, reports of ecstatic vision, the exuberant exhorta- 
tions to “faith” of the Pauline letter—John chose as 
his medium the biographical form, a form previously 
in use in Christian literary expression, but one which 
Paul had found quite unnecessary in his adaptation of 
Christianity for Hellenistic reception. 

Paul, with all his appeal to theological interests, dis- 
played an almost complete disregard for the life of 
Jesus. That Jesus lived and died, that he was buried 
and rose again are the essential facts for Paul. It is 
the drama of redemption that Paul wished to portray. 
As Loisy has put it, 


“Jésus ne préchait pas une religion nouvelle, mais 
l’accomplissement de l’espérance d’Israél. Paul préche 
une religion qui n’est point le judaisme mais une écono- 
mie de salut fondée sur la valeur mystique de la mort 
de Jésus, et dans laquelle on entre en s’unissant par des 
engagements et des rites sacrés a ce Christ, dans sa 
mort salutaire et dans sa glorieuse immortalité.” 


In distinction from Paul, the Fourth Gospel makes 
its appeal to belief on the grounds of a reverent con- 
templation of the values represented by the earthly 
life of Jesus. The one may be grasped in an instant— 
the fact that a God has died and lives again, in union 
with whom lies salvation. 

The other is a reflective process, whose steps must 


*Loisy, Les Mystéres paiéns et le Mystere chrétien, p. 206. 


138 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


be taken deliberately and in order. This is life eternal, 
that they should know Thee. And how is man to 
know God? By the divine illumination, yes. But on 
man’s side, there are steps by which the approach must 
be made to the reception of the gift, and the first 
among these steps is a reflective evaluation of the his- 
torical life of Jesus. By the choice of his vehicle for 
the expression of his message, the author of the Fourth 
Gospel has moved in the direction of intellectualizing 
the mystical experience which constitutes the redemp- 
tive process. 


It is not simply in the choice of the vehicle, how- 
ever, that the Gospel makes its appeal to the reflective 
elements in man’s nature as inherently necessary to 
religious experience. Within the biographical form, 
the author takes definite steps to insure intellectual 
appreciation of the validity of his appeal. ‘This is not 
in any way to minimize that emotional response which 
the book awakens. 


The essential characteristic of the Jesus who ap- 
pears in the Fourth Gospel is love; his tenderness with 
his disciples calls out their affection; he calls for love 
as the eternal bond of union between himself and those 
who follow him. The enthusiastic: devotion of the 
author has been directed toward calling out a gen- 
uinely emotional response from the reader. ‘The book, 
as Drummond has phrased it, 


“with its tender and unearthly beauty, with its rapt 
vision of the life in God, and its promise of a Comforter 
to abide with us forever . .. invites us to rest in peace 
and lose ourselves in dreams of blessedness and love.” ” 


“Drummond, The Character and Authorship of the 
Fourth Gospel, p. 2. 


ITS MEANING IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 139 


It is not to minimize the warmth of emotional 
appeal which the Gospel exerts, that one recognizes a 
corresponding, and a perhaps more self-conscious call 
on the part of the writer to the exercise of one’s 
rational faculties in the appreciation of the life of 
Jesus, a call which differentiates it from any of the 
other formulations of religion which we have examined 
in this study. 

We have already seen that in the characteristic 
vocabulary which the author employs, the presupposi- 
tions are in favor of such an appeal to the rational 
appreciation of the mission of Jesus. “The character- 
istic citation of the witnesses upon whose evidence 
belief in Jesus may be substantiated, constitute a part 
of this appeal. Belief in Jesus comes into being not 
merely as a result of the receptive attitude on man’s 
part, not merely as a result of the enthusiastic accept- 
ance of a set of facts which constitute a drama of 
redemption—a life, death, and resurrection—but is 
built upon testimony which is susceptible of proof 
upon rational grounds. 

Knowledge of God is the goal. This is life eternal. 
But mystical union with Christ is the means through 
which it is attained, and mystical union with Christ is 
contingent upon belief that he was what he claimed to 
be. Belief in him rested upon data, capable of intel- 
lectual apprehension, and susceptible of proof in the 
realm of rational experience. The Gospel opens with 
the testimony of John the Baptist,® and the Old 
Testament writings are repeatedly cited,’” as are the 
words,?® and the works?® of Jesus, as evidence that 
he was actually the Son of God. The miracles are 

i. 6-8, 193 X. 413 V- 33- 
v7. 46-73; xii.36 ff; xvii. 12. 

iv. 41. * xv. 24. 


140 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


treated as “signs,” attestations of his glory,?° and 
belief is called out by them: 


“The works that I do in my Father’s name, these 
bear witness of me.” ™ 


“Tf I do not the works of my Father, believe me not, 
but if I do them, though ye believe not me, believe the 
works: that ye may know and understand that the Father 
is in me, and I in the Father.” ” 


Jesus is represented as saying that his own witness is 
greater than that of John the Baptist: 


“But the witness which I have is greater than that of 
John; for the works which the Father hath given me to 
accomplish, the very works that I: do bear witness of 
me, that the Father hath sent me.”™ 


And at the last, Jesus’s appeal to Philip is on the 
basis of his work: 
“Believe me for the very works’ sake.” ™ 

In the future, Jesus maintains, the disciples them- 
selves and the Spirit of Truth will corroborate this 
testimony which is now being brought by his own 
words and works.?> And finally the appeal is made 
to the Father himself as ‘‘witness” that Jesus actually 
was the Son: 


“The Father that sent me hath borne witness of me.” ” 


“He that sent me is true.” ™ 


The whole fabric of religious experience is repre- 


sented as commending itself for rational acceptance 
by man. 


2 


mi. TY; * v.36. *° Vv. 37. 
eat, “* xiv. II. * vii. 28. 
22 2 

x. 38. XV. 26-27. 


ITS MEANING IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT I4!I 


But belief in Jesus is called out not merely by testi- 
mony in this external realm, but by his own inner 
qualities which put him in a category other than that 
of the ordinary human being. In definite departure 
from the Synoptic record, the Jesus of the Fourth 
Gospel is a divine figure with more than human 
knowledge of people and events. He is fully cog- 
nizant of the meaning of situations. He completely 
understands the motives which actuate the persons 
with whom he comes in contact. He knew Nathaniel 
while he was yet under the fig tree; he knew the early 
life of the Samaritan woman; he knew the character 
of Judas and that he would betray him; and he was 
fully in command of the circumstances of his own life. 


“T lay down my life that I may take it again. No 
one taketh it away from me, but I lay it down of my- 
self. I have power to lay it down and I have power to 
take it again.” ” 


The witness that is external is paralleled by a witness 
within—the witness of the complete mastery and self- 
determination of Jesus, as he moves through the story, 
a majestic, superhuman figure, never the victim of 
circumstance, never the prey of other men’s design, 
himself always completely the master of events. He 
proclaims himself the Son, and the role which is given 
to him in the drama by its author supports that asser- 
tion at every point. 

By a witness which both lies in the realm of external 
data and has subtly woven itself into the very fabric 
of the delineation of Jesus’s character, the Fourth 
Gospel has commended its notion of mystical religious 
experience to its readers. And in another direction as 
well, the Gospel has differentiated the gnosis which is 


mx. t8. 


142 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


central in that religious experience from the gnosis of 
the Hellenistic religions of redemption. 

The Gospel represents the “knowledge of God” 
which is the end of mystical religion not as a complete 
possession, the result of one great illuminating process, 
but as a revelation progressively received. ‘This is the 
office of the Spirit in the Johannine theology. Jesus is 
the full and complete revelation of God: 


“He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” ” 


But still there is need of the agency of the Spirit, an 
agency which is twofold—to teach, and to bring back 
to the remembrance of the disciples the things which 
Jesus has taught.®° Jesus has.many things to say to 
them, which now ‘“‘they cannot bear,” and hence, 


“When the Spirit of Truth is come, he shall guide you 
into all truth.” * 


We have seen how the Hellenistic treatment of the 
gnosis concept tends toward a view of its acceptance as 
ecstatic, cataclysmic, and taking place once for all in a 
great illuminating process known as a “mystery.” 
Paul patterned his view of the gnosis which was Chris- 
tian in its content, after this Hellenistic type, allowing, 
indeed, as they often did, for stages in which the 
“knowledge” was to come, gradations which allowed a 
simpler knowledge for the novice and a higher type 
for the seasoned initiate. The mystery religions had 
provided the éxoteia, which were the consumma- 
tion of knowledge and made the adherent one with the 
deity. 

But each of these experiences was epochal in nature, 

xiv. 9. ™xiv. 26. Cf. Westcott’s note upon the passage. 
Westcott, The Gospel According to St. John, Vol. Il, p. 183. 


“xiv. 9. 


ITS MEANING IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 143 


as it appeared in the Hellenistic view, a little ‘‘con- 
version” or vision, a little cataclysmic experience with 
its own rites and its own results. In its most spiritual 
form, as we have seen in the final vision of Apuleius, 
and in the Hermetic literature, and emphatically in 
Paul, a permanent quality appeared in its results. One 
lived always with the recollection of the vision upon 
one, in a “different way of life’ for having had the 
vision. 

But even here, there is a distinction from the view 
of the Fourth Gospel, where the experience itself is 
progressive. In the Fourth Gospel it is represented as 
a gradual growth in fellowship with Jesus. 


“Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou 
>? 32 


not know me, Philip? 
And a gradually and steadily enlarging appreciation 
of the truth is to be afforded by the Spirit. 

The emphasis, also, on the relationship with Jesus, 
as one that is abiding, leads in the direction of a pro- 
gressive revelation. ‘There is a bread that perisheth, 
but the disciples are urged to labor for the bread that 
“abideth unto eternal life.” *? -The condition of 
knowing the truth is “abiding in Jesus’s word.*4 

Under the figure of the branch abiding in the vine is 
the relationship most clearly expressed. As the branch 
grows while it is part of the vine, so their fellowship 
is to mean enlargement of the truth. Jesus spoke of 
himself as the Light of the world, but he did not rep- 
resent that light as coming to the believer in one 
sudden flash, but as being received as a steady illumina- 
tion in which he is to walk. 

" xiv. 9g. 

* vi. 27. 

M viii. 31. 


144. KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


“He that followeth after me shall not walk in dark- 
ness, but shall have the light of life.” ® 


Jesus, when washing the disciples’ feet, tells them that 
although they do not now know what he does, they 
shall understand hereafter.*® 

Perhaps we may also see a hint of the progressive 
nature of the revelation in the author’s preference for 
the verb yiwa@oxw, “to come to know,” for the desig- 
nation of his gnosis concept over the simple verb 
otda, to know in full. A rough gauge of this prefer- 
ence appears in the fact that twice as many instances 
of the former occur as of the latter. Tivaox inten- 
sifies the progressive quality of the action. And 
significantly the progressive present tense of the verb 
is used in the definition of eternal life: 


“This is life eternal that they should come to know 
[or grow in the knowledge of, (iva ywooxwow )] 
Thee.” 


Eternal life is not knowledge as a possession but as 
a quality of living which is evolutionary, progressively 
achieving in the field of knowledge.*7 We cannot but 
“ recognize here a genuine difference between this con- 
ception and that of Paul. For Paul, the transition 
was sudden, precipitous; and life was at once com- 
pletely different. ‘There was a new increment to life 
which made a man dead to his old self and a ‘“‘new 
man in Christ Jesus.” In the light of his own experi- 
ence he saw the putting off of the old and the putting 
on of the new as effected abruptly and finally, and in 
this he was at one with the prevailing view of the 
theology of the Hellenistic world. 

ev ilis 12, Hie ttle Ff 

“Cf. Inge, Christian Mysticism, Scribner’s, New York, 
1899, Pp. 52. 


ITS MEANING IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 145 


For the Johannine conception, on the other hand, 
the transition, though no less mysterious, no less com- 
plete, no less a work of the Spirit, was in its nature 
less cataclysmic, and its processes were more gradual 
and more reflective. As we contemplate this which 
seems a deliberate choice of language to indicate the 
progressive character of the knowledge of God, we 
are reminded once more of the omissions already noted 
in the Johannine vocabulary. Is it not significant that 
the author avoids such characteristic “mystery” words 
aS yv@Ols, wvotHoiov, teeth, in his designations 
of the mystical experience of knowing God? Grill, 
who goes so far in his effort to establish the genuine 
“mystery” character of the Fourth Gospel as to find 
the Dionysus motif dominating the Gospel, explains 
the avoidance of the term pvotyetov on the grounds 
of its eschatological use in the Synoptics and in Paul.*® 

But it is not the omission of one word alone for 
which we must account, and the omissions become the 
more significant when we reflect upon the place which 
the “knowledge” concept plays in the Gospel. It could 
have demanded no less than studied care to secure the 
avoidance of the noun yv@otc, and in every connec- 
tion he has secured it. Can that avoidance be inter- 
preted in any other fashion so reasonably as that it was 
the writer’s design to prevent a confusion of his notion 
of “knowledge” with that one which was generally 
prevailing in the circles which the work would reach? 

The view, then, which this study would offer is that 
the Fourth Gospel, truly a product of the religious 
syncretism of the Hellenistic world in the early sec- 
ond century, presents a concept of “knowledge” which 
is a reaction from the generally accepted notion in the 


* Grill, Die Entstehung des Vierten Evangeliums, Il, 
Ch. III. 


146 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


theology of the Hellenistic world, and that the author’s 
correction is in the direction of intellectualizing the 
nature of mystical religious experience. ‘The author 
recognized a need for a new expression of Christianity 
in the shifting thought of the world in which he 
lived. . 

His Gospel was to adapt the Christian message for 
that world, and it must speak in the language of 
religious experience current in that world. Partaking 
as the Gospel does, of the actual life of that world, 
it presented Christianity as a religion of individual re- 
demption. It made use of the dualism of Hellenistic 
thought in its categories of Light and Darkness. It 
accepted the current notions of’a preéxistent Logos to 
commend its story of the incarnation. It presented the 
believer’s acceptance of Christianity in the familiar 
terms of a new-birth experience, and it gave a truly 
sacramental significance to the rites of baptism and the 
Lord’s Supper. In these and in other ways, the author 
of the Gospel made use of the current coin of religious 
experience in the Hellenistic world in commending 
Christianity to his readers. 

But as the author has turned from Hellenistic ways 
of thinking in his intense spiritualizing of the nature of 
religious experience, as he gave a wholly new character 
to his Gospel by the centering of its interest about the 
eternal values of mystical fellowship with God through 
Jesus, so in his handling of the “knowledge” concept, 
which he has made fundamental in his analysis of 
religion, he has infused into his concept notions which 
differentiate it sharply from the current Hellenistic 
view. 

“Knowledge” on its Godward side was to him “‘il- 
lumination,” a divine gift of light, mediated through 
Jesus, who came “a light into the world.” But on 


ITS MEANING IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 147 


man’s side, steps must be taken to appropriate the gift, 
steps which involved not merely the emotional nature 
of man, but the ethical and the intellectual as well. 
Ethically speaking, belief was correlative with love, 
and the union of these two concepts was so close as to 
make them inseparable from each other. Intellectually 
speaking, “knowledge” was contingent upon the reflec- 
tive evaluation of the life of Jesus, a process which 
rested upon testimony susceptible of proof in the in- 
tellectual realm. 

The testimony of the Baptist, of the Old Testament, 
of the words and the works of Jesus, of the Spirit of 
Truth, and finally of God himself, give support to an 
appreciation of Jesus as Son of God. In the larger 
field, this evaluation of Jesus is commended by his 
presentation, not in the guise of human friend and 
teacher, but as confessedly divine, omniscient, self- 
determining, and avowedly the unique revelation of 
God. | 

The gnosis of the Fourth Gospel, in distinction 
from that of the Hellenistic religions of redemption, 
was represented as a gradual process of enlightenment, 
progressive in character, rather than suddenly and 
ecstatically received. Progressive fellowship with God, 
a constant but evolutionary process in the human soul, 
not an ecstatic act at a given moment in time, is the 
gnosis of the Fourth Gospel. 

Here, in this differentiation of the gnosis concept 
from that which was current in the author’s environ- 
ment, appears a hint of the motive back of the writing. 
The Pauline presentation of Christianity, congenial as 
it was in most respects to the Johannine writer, must 
have seemed to him to fail at this point. The systems 
of redemption in the Hellenistic religions must have 
seemed pitifully inadequate to one whose apprehension 


; 


148 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


of spiritual reality was so deep, so thorough-going and 
so pervasive of all life. 

It is failure in understanding of the truly subjec- 
tive and poetic nature of the book, to ask for too self- 
conscious a polemic in his handling of a single concept 
—and here is the failure of those who see as basal in 
the writing controversial purposes, militating against 
Judaism, against Gnosticism, or against the Baptist 
sects; and the present writer wishes to guard against 
that error. 

However such polemics may have figured as sub- 
sidiary motives for expression, it is failure of the grav- 
est sort not to recognize in this sublimest of Christian 
documents a genuinely subjective motive for its pro- 
duction, the urge of intense personal religious experi- 
ence. Here was a life so charged with its own mystical 
relationship to God that expression was nothing ex- 
ternal, but was organic in the experience itself. The 
passionate commitment of life to the Christian formula- 
tion of religion must forge its way through to expres- 
sion, and must communicate itself to others by reason 
of its own completeness and dynamic power. 

With full recognition of the un-selfconscious, sub- 
jective nature of the Gospel, one still finds the Gospel 
molded by and directed toward the tendencies of 
thought in its own age, often with the aim of correct- 
ing views which were at variance with those of the 
writer. Such corrective aims we are accustomed to see 
in the author’s treatment of the Judaizing interests of 
the early church, of the sects which magnified the 
claims of John the Baptist over those of Jesus, and of © 
the incipient dangers of Gnosticism. 

The present writer has been convinced by this study 
that such a contributing motive was the urge to fill 
the term “gnosis” with a fuller content than it held in 


ITS MEANING IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 149 


the contemporary religious world. To do this, he 
dared not risk confusion by the employment of the term 
itself. Better to accept a circumlocution than allow 
the ordinarily accepted meaning to blur the concept as 
it figured in his own thought, a concept in which 
reflective thinking, and ethical expression, played as 
full a part as did emotional warmth and religious 
fervor. 

Is it not conceivable that this very shift toward the 
intellectualizing of mystical experience which the 
Fourth Gospel gave to its message was also a spur to 
the intellectualizing of the Christian movement as a 
whole? It was only a few decades later that creed- 
building had begun, and that the “apology” had be- 
come the popular vehicle for Christian expression. 

In his earlier work, Dr. Scott has recognized two 
sources for the Johannine concept of “knowledge,” the 
Platonic theory of the soul’s escape from bondage by 
the contemplation of truth, and the Hebrew notion of 
sympathy and understanding which implies apprecia- 
tion of the moral nature of God. 


“Writing as he did for Greek readers from the point 
of view of Greek philosophical theory, he cannot have 
meant to ignore the fixed Hellenic conception of ‘know- 
ing’ as primarily an act of the logical reason. When 
he insists on the importance of true ‘knowledge,’ he is 
speaking presumably in the language of his own time 
and culture, even though a reminiscence of Hebrew 
usage still lingers about the term.” ” 


This study has led the present writer to the belief 
that a position intermediate between this statement of 
Dr. Scott’s and the one which served as the point of 
departure for the investigation is the accurate one. The 


Scott, The Fourth Gospel, pp. 270 ff. 


150 KNOWLEDGE OF GOD IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT 


statement just quoted needs modification; the culture 
of the author’s own time would hardly have given the 
classical content to the term gnosis. Morgan has 
rightly called our attention to the fact that philosoph- 
ical speculation in the classical sense was no longer 
‘ popular in the first century a.D.*° Hellenistic religious 
categories of “illumination” had replaced those of 
Hellenic logical reasoning in the realm of abstraction. 

But the correction of the statement offered in Dr. 
Scott’s later article seems to the present writer to have 
gone too far. The gnosis of Hellenistic religious ex- 
perience was in content esoteric, presenting either a 
set of rites or a little drama of redemption, and was in 
process ecstatic and emotional. Even the philosophy of 
the day conceived it so. 

And here appears the discriminating, creative gift 
of the author of the Fourth Gospel, that accepting 
from Hellenistic religion its redemption motif, he 
thrust into it a new concept of “knowledge” which 
was partly a fusion of Hellenic philosophical notions 
and Old Testament ethical evaluations, but also more. 
It is not merely reflection upon abstract truth for 
which he asks. It is not merely appreciation of the 
moral nature of God. It is not merely a fusion of the 
two. Nor, on the other hand, has he been content to 
ally himself with the current notions of the Hellenistic 
world. 

Rather, he has held with the best from all, and has 
brought to the Hellenistic notion of “knowledge” that 
is illumination and comes to man by the avenue of 
ecstasy or vision, a correction which, on the content 
side, is a progressive, personal fellowship with Jesus, 
the Son of God, and on its process side, recognizes the 
‘need of man’s reflective powers, and challenges not 


“Morgan, The Religion and Theology of Paul, p. 136. 


ITS MEANING IN JOHANNINE THOUGHT I5!I 


only his emotional, but his intellectual nature as well. 
The power to assimilate and use all that is best in the 
thought of his age, but to break from it and creatively 
to build new values from it, is revealed in the Fourth 
Gospel’s assertion: 


“This is life eternal, that they should grow in the 
knowledge of Thee, the only true God and him whom 
thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.” 


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